"CHUCKLES BITES THE DUST" DAY TWO: EVERYONE DUMB IN THEIR OWN SPECIAL WAY

One of the things that struck me watching "Chuckles" is that many of the characters on the surface seem quite dumb.  But they're each dumb in a very specific way. Ted is a narcissistic blowhard. He doesn't read cues or say the right thing because the only thing he's really aware of is himself. Sometimes that presents as mean; sometimes--as when he's delivering the on-air eulogy, it's just plain clueless.

Sue Ann skews pretty close to that, but there's a meaner edge. She's clueless because she just doesn't care about you, and wants you to know it. (Again, the similarities between her and many of Jane Krakowski's characters is really striking.)

Meanwhile Georgette has not a mean or selfish bone in her. She just has no sense of a broader social context in anything she says. Mary asks, what brings her here? And her response is "Ted. He's parking the car." Buh-dump-bump!

Her cluelessness reads as ditzy dumb, but actually she's quite brilliant in her own way. In "Chuckles" she's given what are the great lines of the whole piece: "It's so sad. Funerals always come too late." It's like a Yogi Berra line, right? But when she's asked to explain, her comments about death and life are quite poignant. 

It's a great writing insight there--lots of sitcoms have multiple characters that seem off, dumb or foolish. Joey and Phoebe. Daryl and his other brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl. Kramer and George. But you want them each to be off in their own very specific way. It makes your story richer and gives you more points of view to play with.

5 WRITING IDEAS FROM MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW'S "CHUCKLES BITES THE DUST": DAY ONE

Ed Asner died today. He was 91, and a goddamn legend. I checked his IMDB page today; he had performed in 131 different projects IN THE LAST TEN YEARS. Some of those actually involved multi-episode gigs, too. And he's got something like another ten projects that haven't even been released yet. 

In reading some obituaries, I kept seeing references to a very famous episode of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW called "Chuckles Bites the Dust", in which a clown who worked at the TV station they're at dies in a freak accident. 

If you don't know the show at all, it's about Mary Tyler Moore working in a TV newsroom. And this particular episode won multiple Emmys, including for David Lloyd's writing. TV Guide has also repeatedly named it one of the best TV episodes of all time. 

And so in honor of the great Ed Asner, this week I'm going to do five short posts about technique pulled from that episode.

I highly recommend watching the episode first. It's a lot of fun. And you can find it here:

1) EVERY EPISODE IS SOMEONE'S FIRST EPISODE

The episode opens on Mary and Murray working in the office. And as they work Sue Ann (Betty White), Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) and Lou Grant (Asner) come in. 

And although the show has had more than 100 episodes at this point, still those opening moments establish who the characters are. Sue Ann is selfish and a little bit mean. (It's so worth watching that opening just to see White in that kind of a role. She is so good at it. She reminds me of Jane Krakowski.) 

Ted is incredibly dumb. Murray is funny in a sort of anarchic, laugh at others' expense way. Mary is friendly, warm, professional. And Lou is bossy and no nonsense.

I'm not sure if I'd say many series today think of that scene one with quite that "restate the characters" intention. But based on "Chuckles" I'd say it can actually still be very effective. I know who each of these characters is and the nature of all their relationships in the first three minutes--and at the same time the sequence sets up what is to come.

It really is true, every episode is someone's first. Or could be--you hope so! You don't want to be repetitive or dumb your content down. But if you're looking for a way in, coming back to the essential funny element of each character and their relationships can be a great place to start.

FOSSE/VERDON: TIME CAPSULE YOUR MONSTER

One of the things that I found really interesting about FOSSE/VERDON is that Bob Fosse is basically a terrible human person and yet somehow I could never write him off as just the villain or antagonist. 

This isn't that uncommon, right? TV is filled with anti-heroes. But Fosse is a bigger challenge than many. On top of being a serial adulterer, he's working his way through the younger women of the casts he directs, punishing those who won't consent and sexually assaulting at least one. He treats Verdon terribly, at every turn asking for her help on his projects while almost never also giving it when she asks for the same. In the finale he's casually monstrous to his daughter as well. And the list goes on.

One technique you see a lot when you're working with a character like this is to lead with their talent. You hear people talk about "saving the cat", having a character help someone or fix a problem right at the top to generate some care for them in the audience. But what they do doesn't have to be a morally good thing as much as they have to be good at it. We respond to a character who has a talent, or has moxie--which really is just another kind of talent. 

FOSSE/VERDON definitely uses that technique--after that end-of-life opening we watch Fosse in his element, figuring out the dance steps with Verdon and then slowly putting together the number. And when "bad" things have to happen in the sequence, either Verdon is the one who suggests and implements it (the firing of the first dancer) or Fosse goes about it in the most sympathetic way possible (the second firing, in which he says I'm going to help you). Even the moment of him walking off with the red head is presented in a subtle way. She sure seems to look an awful lot like Verdon, but there's nothing lascivious in his behavior itself. 

That's part of actor Sam Rockwell's technique throughout--other than a couple aggressive moments with young women, he's always playing Fosse as gentle, warm, curious about others and hiding his actual wants and drives.

Which is itself a great suggestion for writers: Let your character behave and speak in ways that are the opposite of who they are and what they want. Being "on the nose" is not just about having a character say exactly what they're wanting or feeling, it's about having them make choices that are the same. People aren't really like that; we hide what we want from others and from ourselves.  

Another technique is to make the character somehow sympathetic. FOSSE/VERDON opens on Fosse when he is old and fragile and seemingly about to die. And in that opening it also gives us that abrupt glimpse of his childhood, which will be this tremendous source of trauma the show keeps going back to. 

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of this technique. It can be very effective, but it also becomes a way of diminishing the terrible things the character has done. He's not a monster, he's just someone that's been hurt. The fact is, you can be both, and Fosse is. If I had one note for FOSSE/VERDON, it would be that they don't allow for that enough.

But the main technique that Steven Levenson and his writers use to keep Fosse sympathetic is they Time Capsule his bad behavior. That is to say, rather than presenting his bad actions up front, they release it in small quantities throughout the series. Yes, we learn in the pilot that he's cheating on Verdon, even after promising to stop. 

But we don't find out that when he started going out with Verdon he was cheating on his very sick wife until the second episode--or that he used that wife to start his career, just as he's using Verdon now. We don't see him assault a woman until the fourth episode. We don't see him hurt his daughter in any way until the finale. And on and on. 

It's a companion piece, really, to Make The Bad Guy sympathetic; just as we raise up the sad parts of his backstory, we hold back on some of his worst actions until later, after the audience has had plenty of time to fall in love with the guy and is as a result much less likely to walk away from him. And even so, I think it's really notable that they save him disappointing/using his daughter Nicole until the very last episode. There's no doubt given his behavior he hurt her long before she was an adult. But if all the way along we were seeing how much he was harming not just Verdon but their daughter, would we have stayed with him? I don't know. It may very well be the bridge too far. 

NOW YOU TRY...

You want to try this for yourself? Take a character you're working with. Could be your protagonist, the villain or someone else unlikable. Try playing with some of these techniques. What can you give them to make them sympathetic? What's the talent they have that you can raise up right from the start? What are the details about them you could bury and save for later, either to control their possible negative impact (if you're dealing with a protagonist) or to maximize it (if you're dealing with a villain)? 

Or--my favorite technique of the bunch--can you flip any of their actions or dialogue so that instead of explicitly representing what they want or feel they suggest the opposite? 

If you're looking for a fun writing exercise, you might try just writing a scene where one or a number of the characters behave in this way. Your hero's at a supermarket and she's desperate to buy mayo. GO.

FOSSE/VERDON: HOW TO REVEAL CHARACTER

Yesterday I talked about how much the opening of the pilot of FOSSE/VERDON focuses on Gwen, the character we are less likely to know and also our way into the series, really. The show is clearly a two-hander, but the internal life of Bob Fosse is rarely to be found anywhere near the surface. 

The show tells us who he is and what he's dealing with it in part via flashbacks, some of them just a moment that create a sense of the character's internal tension; and a few of them are much longer, more involved. 

In large part, though, we learn who Fosse is from his choices, like his constant philandering with the women of his casts, without ever really showing any remorse for any of it. Or calling on Gwen time and again to help save his projects while not coming through for hers. 

It's a great technique. There's no better way to reveal character than through the character's actions. Choices propel story, create complications, and demonstrate wants or priorities. At the same time, in the case of a character like Fosse--who so rarely offers any kind of introspection or self-sharing--actions give the audience room to interpret for themselves, which can make for a much more satisfying experience. It feels like we're building the story with the actors and creators.

But in FOSSE/VERDON, we do get a couple moments where Fosse reveals himself. And they're worth considering for anyone trying to work out how to allow your character to be self-revelatory without it seeming artificial, convenient or momentum-killing. 

Here's one such moment, from the second episode. Fosse is trying to find a way to end Act One of SWEET CHARITY. And he's just been played the song we hear ongoing in the background.

 

We can talk about how short the scene is--limiting its ability to kill momentum or turn into some kind of monologue--or how it's a scene with some conflict--always a good place to hide any kind of exposition. But to my mind the key to the success of this scene as self-revelation is that Fosse's goal here is not self-revelation. This is a scene about finding the right number. Everything he says is at the service of that goal.

In 107 Fosse is watching the cast do "All that Jazz" and it's driving him nuts. Eventually he figures out the problem, and once again we get a mini-monologue focused on the scene, who these characters are what they're doing up here. And yet what allows him to speak with such insight is that the whole time he's really talking about himself. 

NOW YOU TRY!

So, how can you use this? Let's apply author Steven Levenson's technique. 

Think about a character you're writing, and a reveal you need them to offer at some point. I'm writing Spider-Man, and I need to reveal that he's afraid of having his heart broken by Mary Jane. 

Now, turn your eyes away from that self-disclosure for a moment and consider your character's talents and passions. For Fosse, everything is about the theater. What is your character "all about"? Spidey is all about saving lives. Being a super hero. Making cool science gadgets. Soaring through the air. 

Now, can you come up with a problem related to that "all about" that you can use as a way of delivering the reveal or self-disclosure you need?  Spidey has to rescue a kid who is thrown from a plane. It seems impossible, but he accomplishes it. And when MJ asks how he did that, he explains it's all science. Velocity, acceleration, wind speed, torque--you put those things together correctly, and you will succeed, no matter how crazy it seems on the surface. And it's the area where he's happiest for precisely that reason. He'd rather save 100 babies thrown out of planes than...and MJ fills in the rest. 

(Then Spidey asks Dr. Strange to make everyone forget he's Peter Parker, and Dr. Strange is like, Dude, We are not doing One More Day. And comic fanboys breathe a sigh of relief while everyone else is like, BRING US TOBEY.

Really not sure about that new trailer...)

Don't make the scene about the reveal. Make the reveal organic to the story and the character's talents/desires. Maybe also consider flipping the tone--Fosse bares his soul in the scene above while talking about a happy dance number. And keep it tight--in my experience anyway, the longer my characters talk the more pedantic and OTN they're going to get. 

FOSSE/VERDON: HOW TO OPEN A SHOW

I'm obsessed with series openings and endings. They both have so many goals to accomplish--an opening wants to grab you so hard you can't turn away, while showing you something of the world, its characters, relationships and conflicts; the ending wants to come back to all of that and provide some kind of culminating idea or event that is both totally unexpected and yet in retrospect absolutely inevitable. 

This weekend while I waited for a hurricane that (thankfully) never came to New York, I watched FOSSE/VERDON, the 2019 FX docuseries about choreographer and director Bob Fosse and his lifelong partner actress/producer Gwen Verdon. And I was bowled over by its opening, which watches Verdon and Fosse together choreograph and film the "Big Spender" number from the movie SWEET CHARITY. 

A couple lessons learned in the watching: 

1)  THE OPENING TEACHES US A LANGUAGE: The very beginning of the series shows a very old Fosse in a tux, someone knocking on his door and him telling them they're too early. It's both a somewhat standard story technique today--Hollywood loves to start at the end--yet also has a bigger, more metaphorical dimension, as we get a caption that tells us this is "19 years before the end".

FOSSE/VERDON will occasionally have moments like this where we enter into a kind of a fantasy related to their lives. In the Lenny Bruce episode we keep cutting to Fosse as Bruce telling his life story on stage like a stand up routine. In another episode Fosse's temptation to commit suicide is presented as an offshoot of PIPPIN.

Although here in the opening it's a much gentler kind of fantasy--it could actually be happening rather than an end-of-life metaphor--still the moment teaches us something of the language of the show. 

During those brief seconds we also get a momentary cutaway to a younger Fosse tap dancing. The show will be filled with split second flashbacks like this. Once again, inserting that moment here is about teaching us how to "read" what is to come.

2) THE OPENING BUILDS UP THE CHARACTER WE DON'T KNOW: Despite having died almost 40 years ago, Bob Fosse remains very well known, especially for his explosive and highly controlled choreography. There's just nothing like it. 

Gwen Verdon, on the other hand, despite winning four Tonys in five years and being in many ways an equal partner in some of Fosse's greatest triumphs, is not well remembered today. 

And so what does the opening do? It focuses on her, and does so in a way that makes us fall head over heels in love with her.

We begin on the two of them testing out some choreography. They're clearly peers, Gwen giving him a hard time. But the attention is all on her--she's the one center stage doing the moves, and him moving about the edges, watching her (and in doing so telling us to watch her).  At the end he notes that he likes her choreography better, which tells us a ton about who she is and how they are together.

Then we cut to the two of them working together with the actors and the studio on the scene. And as the scene goes on it's more and more Gwen's scene. She's the one who really digs in with the actress, helping her think through her part; she's the one who talks the studio exec down; she's the one who makes the first call about removing a dancer; she's the one who teaches the dancers something about the shoulder roll that Fosse himself doesn't understand. She's the one so invested in the scene she's literally singing along from offstage as Fosse shoots it. 

In just that few minutes the script tells us everything we need to know about her, and does it in a way that is so incredibly winning, her "saving" one cat after another, that we leave the scene far more invested in her than in Fosse. 

(Just the sequence of she and Fosse talking to the actress about why she's got her leg up on the bar is so perfectly written it would have made us fall for her all by itself. Steven Levenson and his writers write the hell out of the whole season, and one of the things they are especially good at is moments like this where Fosse or Verdon steps back to consider the deeper layers of the show they're in. There's a later scene where Fosse talks about CHICAGO that is just next level genius.)

The sequence also sets up the major conflicts of the series, which are the struggles Verdon has to face: Fosse's philandering, which here is gently alluded to in the fact of him walking off with a young actress, who happens to be another redhead; and the fact she's only allowed to be equal to a point. While Fosse is shooting, in the thick of it all, she's left off stage. At the end of the scene we watch her reaction first, then she looks to Fosse--because that's who ultimately matters.

3) THE OPENING KNOWS WHAT WE WANT AND USES IT:  What do you want to see in a show about musical theater? You want to see performances. 

The opening uses that desire brilliantly. The SWEET CHARITY sequence begins in fact with the actresses starting the number, then immediately cuts away to Fosse and Verdon working with the actresses. And from there it keeps going back and forth, the performance teasing us onward, promising that thing we want. 

And by the time we get to the actual number, we're so used to the back and forth of the onstage and offstage, that the performance can weave together with the behind the scenes of it all without any sense of interruption. It's all of a piece.  

Really the opening is just like the number it shows, a perfect seduction. 

JIMMY MCGOVERN WEEK: THINK OF YOUR PROCEDURAL AS A RELAY RACE

In 2018 Jimmy McGovern released a six part series called BROKEN. It starred Sean Bean as a Catholic priest in a poor parish in the Liverpool area where McGovern is from. And in many ways it sounds very dark. The priest is haunted by some kind of abuse that happened in his past; the main story of the pilot is a mother so desperate to pay her bills that when her mother dies unexpectedly she hides the body for three days so that she can get her mother's pension check. Seriously, it has TOUGH stuff in it. 

And yet, in the watching the series is anything but relentless. We get first communions, amazing confessions and sermons, the priest playing cards and bowling with his brothers. It's kind of wonderful in its way. In fact, I would say it might be the best show about Catholicism I've ever seen. For the life of me I've never understood why we don't have parish procedurals the same way we have police, doctor or law. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, this show very much shows the way. 

The magic recipe seems to include two main ingredients plus a special sauce. On the one hand, it has a central character, Father Michael, who we follow for the whole six episodes, and who has a real arc and journey of his own. 

On the other, it has a set of supporting characters who each appear only for a couple episodes, and yet when they are present, they are given pretty close to equal footing with Michael. So for instance in the first episode we are with down-on-her-luck mom Christina at least as much as we are with Michael, and certainly in more profound kinds of moments. In 103 similarly we spend a lot of time with a cop named Andrew, most of it with Michael nowhere around. 

That's the procedural element, right? It's case of the week. Except--and this for me is the secret sauce of the show--instead of creating a sort of hard break between episodes, aka this is Christina's episode, this is Andrew's, this is Helen's--McGovern will introduce characters in one episode in a background way and then pull them to the forefront in later episodes. We meet Andrew at the top of 102, when he's forced to arrest Christina for what she's done. Then suddenly at the end of 102 Andrew is part of a team of cops involved with a serious incident that turns him into the main character in 103 and a recurring character after that. 

In 102 we also meet Roz, who has a serious gambling problem and sees trouble on the horizon. (She's played by Paula Malcolmson, and I would say no matter how much you loved her in RAY DONOVAN, DEADWOOD or SONS OF ANARCHY, this is her greatest role.) 

She recurs on her own for a number of episodes before suddenly in 104 we meet her kids, including daughter Chloe. And then suddenly in 106 it's Chloe, not Roz that is central.

So basically the way McGovern writes the show is like a relay race. Characters are introduced, and then eventually they take up the baton themselves for a times, only to hand it off somewhere in the next episode. Sometimes they recur after that, or some element of their story continues; sometimes they really don't (or at least not until the end). And sometimes the same thing happens within an episode--there's a character we meet early in the pilot that seems like the heavy, and then suddenly near the end out of the blue they get a tremendous moment of their own.

The net effect is to give the overall series a wholistic feel. We're not watching six stories, we're watching one, the story of a community. There's something satisfying about that approach that I don't find you get from your standard procedural. And yet it absolutely functions as one.

JIMMY MCGOVERN WEEK: MAKING YOUR DOCUDRAMA VERITÉ--MINE THE GAPS

In 1996 McGovern wrote a TV film called HILLSBOROUGH, which you can find here. It's a documdrama about a horrible disaster that befell the community of Hillsborough. In 1989 as residents piled in for a soccer match, they were sent the wrong way and ended up trapped in an area far too far for their number. 97 people were crushed to death, and then in the aftermath the police -- who were entirely responsible for the disaster -- made up stories about the attendants being drunk, pissing on bodies, stealing wallets. Horrible, horrible stuff. 

McGovern set out to tell the stories of three of the families who lost someone at Hillsborough, as well as to some extent of the police who were involved -- both the men at the top who created this disaster, and those at the bottom, who were forced to witness this horrifying disaster without being able to stop it, and then were asked to lie about what happened. 

The film's an interesting watch for the way that McGovern and director Charles McDougall went out about telling the tale. There's no soundtrack, nor any main character. We shift back and forth among the families and the officers as the story warrants. 

At times it even feels like you're stumbling into scenes rather than watching something that has been crafted. And even in the second half when we've moved from the actual incident and aftermath to the journalists and the court cases and the families trying to survive, there's still very much a "found" quality to the story. So for instance one of the main characters, who lost both his children in the disaster, in the second half seems to have a more authorial role vis-a-vis the families. And there's no explanation given at the top. You just see it happening and wonder, okay, is he a lawyer representing them, or somehow connected to the city, what is going on. 

It's not a major element, it doesn't distract from the story. In fact it doesn't take long to find out that oh, he's the spokesperson for the families. But just that choice to create a little gap of information gives the story a very verité quality. 

There's another choice like this that the film uses repeatedly. One or more of the characters will be in a position where they have to interact with someone official, or a group. And McGovern and McDougall make the choice to have those arguments pretty much impossible to follow, both because of the speed of what's being batted around and the chaos of people talking over each other. Other than a key phrase here or there, someone begging that his wife not be told or a copper telling one of the leads that his [deceased] daughter is no longer his property, she's the property of the Crown until their investigation, you really don't follow the dialogue at all. 

Fom some writers' point of view that might seem terrible.  But I gave you such beautiful pearls! But we're so used to everything being so scripted, and with it to dialogue always having this privileged place of clarity in a movie or TV show, just this small kind of disruption of the paradigm, that sense of not being able to follow this, grants the story another feeling of realism. (The audio levels are kept low, as well. We're literally not meant to follow this.)

 It also matches the writing to the experience of the charaters. Life in those kinds of moments (and so many others) is chaos. You don't follow it all, and you're not heard, and it's overwhelming. So even as it makes the storytelling feel more realistic, that choice also quietly lets us into the families' point of view. 

Really throughout the film McGovern and McDougall find ways of playing both sides--objectivity and subjectivity--like that. So at one point the camera moves through a room of police quiet and completely lost after what they've witnessed. It's very documentary-like, no authorial sense to the shot. And yet that moment absolutely tells me everything I need to do know about what's going on inside those coppers' heads. 

Documdramas are such a big business today. If you're looking for ideas on how to do yours in a documentary-style way, check out HILLSBOROUGH.

JIMMY MCGOVERN WEEK: FLIP THE SCRIPT

This week I'm writing about the work of UK TV writer Jimmy McGovern, whose work I really love. To me he's a little like the darkness of David Milch mixed with more beauty and realism. You're not going to find deadbeat cowboys doing Shakespeare, but you will take a journey into struggle or suffering that ends up being filled with unexpected moments of life. 

McGovern does a lot of TV movies as well as series. Many of them seem to be dramatic reenactments of events. In 2020 he released ANTHONY, which tells the story of the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker by insane white guys. The film is available in the States on Peacock, and I highly recommend it. Once again he takes the familiar and comes at it in a different way--rather than your typical Let's meet our character and his friends, see what an incredible person he was and then wait for him to die, McGovern starts 9 years after Walker's death, and proposes to show us the life he could have had had he not been murdered. It's about the future that was lost as well as the person, and not just for Walker but for all those he would have come in contact with. 

And at the same time, starting in the future somehow makes the film more resistant to anything maudlin. It actually plays like a fun kind of origin story, us seeing him in this great opening place in his life, and then slowly winding back how he got there. And I think because the approach is so unusual, we're left unsure what's going to happen when we fall back to age 16. Are they going to show us those horrible events, or are we somehow going to get the version where he doesn't die? The uncertainty frees us up to just enjoy being with him--in a sense it lulls us into a false sense of security.

Within the film, there's a scene that really stood out to me. It's very late in the story, we're back at age 16, Anthony is in critical condition. And after introducing his mother very gradually -- another benefit of McGovern's year by year flashback approach--suddenly we're in her moment. In fact I'm pretty sure age 16 begins not with Anthony but with his mom singing with her church choir. It's the most alive and vibrant that we've seen her, actually. 

So anyway, she's at the hospital and a care worker comes to tell her how serious things are. You've seen this scene, maybe written it. It's all about the dramatic irony of us knowing something the character doesn't, and the suspense of wondering how she will react to it. Her emotions become the moment of catharsis for us, having had to carry the burden of knowing what's happened. The sequence even sets up that expectation. We open into it on an unseen person who picks up a box of tissues and then walks to go meet Anthony's mom.

But McGovern does the craziest thing--instead of making the scene about Anthony's mom, he makes it all about the care worker (who we have never seen before and will never see again). 

I'm exaggerating a little--of course this moment is about Anthony's mom. But her reaction is so self-contained and focused on praying to God, it's almost like she doesn't have an arc at all. Whereas the care worker, who agrees to pray with Anthony's mom, seems completely out of her depth by it all, uncertain at first about this whole idea of praying and then slowly devastated by the wave after wave of stories and thoughts that Anthony's mom shares about him. 

At the end of the sequence as the doctor comes in, it's the care worker that is in tears, and us as well. The fact that the care worker is so anonymous, someone we've never met before or will again, allows us to project ourselves into her position. Which actually makes much more sense than placing us in the shoes of Anthony's mom. We're not the person who has gone through the trauma; we're the one who has witnessed it and doesn't know what to do. 

When you get to something familiar, consider flipping the script in some way. In this case, that means making the scene not about the mom but about the care worker; or making the story of a tragic death not about what led up to it but what was lost after.

I realize this suggestion is a familiar note for anyone who's been reading this blog for very long, but still I say it again, not only because it's true but because when a writer does it well, the scene that results is just something magic.  

In some ways this blog is a collection of not thoughts about writing but my magpie collection of shiny things I found along the way. I hope it's also helpful.

JIMMY MCGOVERN WEEK: WHAT'S THE MOST INTERESTING WAY?

Jimmy McGovern is one of the great British TV writers. His work on shows like BROKEN, CRACKER or TIME and in films like THE PRIEST, HILLSBOROUGH or ANTHONY is filled with complex, unexpected characters usually confronting both terrible hardship and moments of tremendous beauty. 

I happen to be working on a profile of McGovern right now, and so I've been watching a lot of his work. And although I realize some of it won't be known so well here in the States I'm going to write about him this week, because he really is so good. 

One of the things McGovern likes to do is anthology series--he's got one show focused on the stories happening on a single road (known as THE STREET); another about people accused of crimes that focuses not on the case but on the journey of their lives up to their trial -- ACCUSED. Even BROKEN, his powerful six part series about a priest in Liverpool, ends up also being a sort of anthology series about a set of characters in the parish. 

In ACCUSED 201, McGovern and co-writer Shaun Duggan tell the story of Tracie, a transvestite who falls in love with a man, Tony, who claims to be a widower. Sean Bean plays Tracie, and while some of the thinking around what it means to be trans is out of date at this point--such as the fact of having a straight man play a trans character--Bean's performance is tender and vulnerable. He won an International Emmy for it.

There's a scene late in the episode, after Tracie has found out that in fact Tony's wife Karen is still alive and working as a sort of beauty consultant, where Tracie makes an appointment and has a conversation with Karen. 

It's a scene that we've all seen before--the wife or mistress snooping on the other woman. It also has a lot in common with MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, in that the "other woman"--Karen--is just a total sweetheart, much like Cameron Diaz's character in that film. 

But there's something about the scene that's absolutely unique. Even as Karen is in a sense everything that Tracie might be afraid of, a la MY BEST FRIEND, there's none of that movie's sense of the character mostly being there in order to affect Tracie, or being over the top in her sweetness. 

I've been trying to parse how McGovern & Duggan accomplish that. Here's the episode; the scene starts at 27:00. See what stands out for you.

For me, I think the key is that McGovern & Duggan give Karen a kind of Save the Cat moment.  Presented with a transgender patron, she neither runs away nor ignores that fact. She treats her like any other customer,  which means acknowledging who Tracie is -- talking about what's best for her skin, admiring her cheekbones and asking about her life. 

She's the only character in the entire episode that actually expresses interest in Tracie as a person, who wants to know her story.

Tracie is of course checking Karen out, comparing herself, pumping her for information, even giving a little hint that she knows Tony. But that dynamic is not able to take over in the way it normally does in these kinds of stories. There's too much goodwill that's been built at the beginning, and that recurs at the end, with Karen really feeling for Tracie upon hearing the man she's seeing is married and said his wife is dead. Once again, she's the only person in the episode who treats Tracie as a friend. 

This is just one scene, right in the middle of the episode, and in a way it proves to be off track from the plot. Tracie doesn't do anything as a result of what she's learned, and while Tony gets freaked out it's not this moment that alerts Karen to anything happening but her seeing Tracie's name on his phone.

And yet for me it's the high point of the ep, I think precisely because it resists the conventions in favor of giving us a human moment. 

When you're writing that scene that seems so familiar, so conventional, maybe take a minute to stop and ask yourself, Is there another approach to this scene that I haven't seen before? What's the most interesting way forward? 

MUSICAL WEEK II: MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS LET US FILL IN THE BLANKS (aka THE TOOTIE VARIATION)

You're going to think I'm kidding, but I promise you I'm not when I say that I love the musical MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS not for Judy Garland chasing her man and singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", although that is all fine, but for Tootie, the little sister character who seems to be obsessed with death. 

"Seems to be": She and her sister make it look like the tram runs over a person. She buries dolls for fun. On Halloween she volunteers to kill their neighbor by throwing flour in his face, and when their father announces they're moving she runs outside and basically beats a snowman to death. 

She's got issues, does our Tootie. And what's truly wild is, none of the other characters ever say a word about any of it. It's like a subplot written just for us.

Hopefully it goes without saying, but just in case it doesn't: Giving your supporting characters stories of their own is almost always a good idea. They don't have to be big. They don't have to related to the main character's--although Shakespeare certainly makes a good case for the value of secondary character stories echoing and playing off the main character's journey. 

Every character arc is another hook, another chance for the audience to fall in love and commit. You can even hate the main character of a show and still adore it, because you are ride or die for someone else on it. 

And the Tootie Variation is this: You don't even have to provide a coherent arc. If you give your supporting characters even just one or two unusual characteristics, we will fill in the gaps. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS is clearly the story of a young serial killer. So is THE OFFICE. For that matter so is FRIENDS. 

It's in our DNA really to create story, so much so that when a film or story doesn't give us all the information, it's actually kind of exciting for us. Knowing that, we can lean into it.

MUSICAL WEEK II: NINE LOSES THE THREAD

I feel like inside many writers there's an instinct to try and write a script where the protagonist is largely passive. 

Let me put that another way--I've both read and written my fair share of scripts where this is the case. Sometimes (many times) it's a matter of us not really understanding our protagonists or wanting to protect them when we should be forcing them out of the nest and throwing rocks at them on the way down. 

But every once in a while we consciously choose to write a script that way. I think it's because we have this sense that it's more realistic. Sometimes you don't know what to do in life, and you flail.

The problem (actually the blessing) is, movies and TV shows are not real life. It's maybe our greatest magic trick as writers--we want to hold a mirror up to life in one way or another, without being as dull and flat as normal life often is. We want our audiences to think they are looking at real life, while actually not being real. 

NINE, the Anthony Minghella/Michael Tolkin-penned film adaptation of the Maury Weston/Arthur Kopit Broadway musical based on the Fellini movie 8 1/2, means to dramatize protagonist/Fellini stand-in Guido Contini's mid-life crisis. Which sounds like it could be pretty yummy terrain for a movie. Crisis=conflict=drama! 

But for the most part the movie is the same scene played over and over--Guido trying to hide from the world and the crisis he's in and looking to different women to help him escape.

To the writers' credit, they do try to make his situation more interesting by offering complication after complication. Having chosen to hide out with his mistress at a spa, first his producer shows up--and brings with him the entire staff; then his wife, who then discovers his mistress is there, which forces him both to chase his wife to try and talk his way out of what's happened, and also deal with his mistress, who is so upset at the way he reacted to his wife seeing her that she takes some pills. 

But in dealing with her he loses whatever progress he might have made with his wife, and also his producer, who then drags him to the set where he has to meet his star, who when she discovers there is no script and that he means to once again reduce her onscreen to his visual muse is just not having it. Finally the film has to be shut down. 

They're all great big complications. The problem is, they never bring Guido to make any choices of his own. He just keeps angsting/running away until he's lost everything. 

There's a final sequence some months later where he does make a choice, to make a new movie and try to win his wife back. Again, it sort of captures what happens in real life--how often is it the case that we don't move and change until after everything falls apart? But in a film or TV show that's the inciting incident. You just can't expect the audience to wait two hours for your character to do something.

There are a couple moments in the film that are interesting. Every time Judi Dench shows up the film suddenly comes to life. It's the same with Nicole Kidman's actress and to some extent with Kate Hudson's reporter. 

I think what makes them different is that each of them has a life outside Guido and his drama. They speak and act with real agency of their own. In a film where the protagonist won't do anything, characters who do just leap off the screen. 

Also the performances are tremendous. Just to present one: this is Kidman's whole sequence.

Even as she's singing that she loves him, she's so not wrapped up in him and his nonsense. She makes her own choices. 

I've never seen the stage version of NINE. From what I gather director Rob Marshall cut most of its songs and asked for new material from composer Maury Yeston, despite it having won 5 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Direction. I'm going to guess it holds together quite a bit better. 

When it comes to storytelling, it's all about choices. A character's choices tell us who they are and what they want. They create the circumstances from which complications and the next choices can occur. And they get us invested in the character. People talk about opening with a save the cat moment, and I think that's often a good idea. But really the point is not doing a good deed but making a big character-defining choice. That's what gets us hooked. 

If a character is mostly passive, we may learn things about who they are and what they want. But it's very hard to be interested in them.

MUSICAL WEEK II: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN TURNS THE CAMERA

I had all these brilliant plans to watch the film version of Kander & Ebbs' musical KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN last night. I'm a big fan of Raul Julia, and I was very excited to see what he would do with the role of Valentin, the Latin American dissident who has been arrested and put in a cell with the transgender Molina, played by William Hurt. 

The film is actually very hard to find online. No streaming service carries it. But finally I discovered it had been downloaded to YouTube, and I settled in to watch the story unfold. 

And then about five minutes in this little bell started sounding inside me. Do I have this right? I scoffed at the thought. There's no way Hollywood would take a Tony Award-winning musical and turn into a straight drama, is there? (I mean, what planet am I living on. Of course Hollywood would do that.)

And then about five minutes later I thought, Have I ever heard William Hurt sing? I don't think I have, nor heard tell of it. 

So then I paused the film and discovered actually, this film is not only not a musical, it's not based on the musical, but rather on the same source text the musical would look to years later. (Yeah, the musical came later.)

I did still get to see the musical, but pretty much the worst possible version possible. 

All of which is to say I had pretty much given hope of having something for today. But then in the shower something about the story hit me that I think is worth mentioning. Until very recently and still almost never, the queer character is the supporting role. They're the best friend. Cue them up for something sassy and wise or, as I wrote about GREATEST SHOWMAN, to bless/redeem a straight character. 

The film version of KISS opens on Molina, the transgender woman in jail for having sex with a minor, telling a story to Julia's Valentin. Valentin has his back to us for a good long time, and as it turns out Molina is telling a story to try and help him, all of which (plus the fact that this is goddamn Raul Julia) suggests that he is the protagonist of the story. 

The musical version goes exactly the other way. We start on Valentin, not Molina, and the bigger story line of the piece is all about Molina being pushed by the prison to draw information out of Valentin in exchange for the chance to see his dying mother, while Molina is slowly falling in love with Valentin, all while he's haunted by visions of the Spider Woman whose kiss kills. 

He is the character with the biggest stakes, the biggest struggle, the greatest degree of vulnerability and whose point of view informs absolutely everything. It is clearly his story.  

That's not to say it had to be. I don't know how the film plays out, but there is definitely a version of this story that is about Valentin, and that plays into the queer supportive friend trope so that Molina's betrayal can be that much more surprising. 

But by choosing to turn the camera away from the familiar protagonist and focus instead on the back-up singer, Kander and Ebb and book writer Terrence McNally create a radically different story, one much more emotionally tender and also painful. 

Whether conceiving a pilot or considering a pitch for an episode, it's a helpful exercise to stop and reimagine things from different characters' points of view. You will absolutely find new veins of story to mine for your ensemble. But you may also find that the most interesting or emotional story to tell, the character who should be at the center is not the one who seems natural or hungry for the spotlight, but the one standing quietly off to the side, always relegated to the supporting role. 

MUSICAL WEEK II: SUICIDE SQUAD BACKS THE STORY

I honestly was only planning to do one day on SUICIDE SQUAD and get back to people shimmy shimmying til their garters break...and all that jazz. But yesterday as I was writing about the movie the scale of the movie's achievement when it comes to backstory was really hitting me. 

Let me say this: in general, in my very humble opinion, backstories generally suck. Not that every character shouldn't have one, or that those backstories shouldn't inspire their current choices. Just don't stop to tell me about it. Don't give me flashbacks, don't tell me sob stories. I mean what I said literally--backstories suck the life out of the story. 

And that's for a pretty simple reason: most of the time, in order to present a back story, we have to hit pause on the present day story that we signed up to watch. And so not only does it kill the momentum, but it has the fingerprints of the writer all over it. Hey guys, there's this data I need you to know now. Ugh. 

That's not to say some movies and TV shows don't do it well, but it's a lot harder than it looks, and most efforts fail. 

SUICIDE SQUAD is like a primer in smart methods of doing backstory. I'm going to list five that stood out to me. 

1) Reveal the backstory in the midst of conflict. This is the classic method of dealing with any kind of exposition. You reveal it in the middle of whatever shit the characters are in,  and that conflict creates a sense of urgency that beats back the momentum-killing vibe of the exposition. 

Or even better, you let the conflict itself be what inspires the revelation. DuBois sees his daughter, she's in trouble, his response is not at all what a dad's should be, and fighting about their relationship ensues. 

Other than one other beat on the bus, that's all we get of DuBois's backstory. And it's literally all that we need. It tells us why he's doing what he's doing, and gives his story stakes. 

2) Make it a mystery. This is another pretty common technique, but it's a lot more dicey than planting a backstory within a conflict, because it involves the promise that the backstory will both be worth waiting for and also that it will prove somehow relevant. That's hard to land.

In SUICIDE SQUAD, Cleo's backstory has a certain element of mystery. Gunn doesn't lean into this too hard, which has the effect of not making it too big a deal for us. It's just this question that keeps popping up--why rats? 

And for the most part the question is being asked by DuBois, because he has this pathological fear of rats. Which becomes another light touch mystery of its own. 

Both those mysteries get answered on the bus. And here's the thing--in a sense their reveals don't propel the story forward, and so really I should be saying they're a mixed bag. But they do propel the characters forward, both as people that we care about and as people who care about one another. That scene on the bus is the turning point in the Cleo/DuBois relationship. It gives them both a much more immediate stake in their situation, and us a great stake in them. 

3) Find a way to set the backstory in the present. As Cleo tells us her backstory, the camera stays locked on her, while we see her tale play out on the window behind her. It's a lovely visual, and it quite literally makes Cleo's backstory something that is happening in the present, as they're driving to grab the Thinker. 

Abner's backstory constitutes a deft version of 1, 2 and 3. Like Cleo and DuBois with the rats, Abner's powers are set up as a mystery. Even before we get to see them in action, we get these weird signs--the strange growths on Abner's face, the flash of color when he disappears into the jungle to take care of them, and his general refusal to reveal much of anything about himself. 

All of which naturally leads the team to insist on an explanation, and very much for a present moment reason: they need to know that he's going to be able to carry his end, and that he's not a danger to them. And so Abner's backstory becomes a thing of necessity rather than a "Hey, let's stop and tell a story." And it's something he's forced to do, i.e. it's revealed in the midst of a kind of conflict.

Gunn takes the idea of setting the backstory in the present to such a crazy-wonderful extreme with Abner, too. At the end of his story of what his mother did to he and his siblings, it's revealed that Abner projects his mother onto everyone. Which is hilarious and disturbing and totally unique. But it also very much makes his backstory relevant in an ongoing way. She becomes his motive for action just as much as DuBois' daughter (and surrogate daughter Cleo) are his. 

4) Have them tell the story while they're in motion. This seems like a very minor point, but it really seems to work. If a character reveals their backstory while they're in motion--in the case of Cleo and DuBois, on a moving bus--just the visual of them moving can create that sense of propulsion that backstories can so often kill. 

5) Just don't do it. We never learn anything about the backstory on Peacemaker, other than a passing nod he gives about fucked up dads when DuBois is talking about his. 

And certainly in part that lack is because Gunn has a Peacemaker TV series coming. But honestly, I think his storyline works just fine without any more information. He's a great example of how little we actually need about a character's history in order to really connect with them in a film. 

Nanaue is just the same. His entire story is rooted in the present, and it's just fine. If anything, his lack of a backstory creates a kind of vacuum that naturally calls forth some kind of character-defining relationship, which becomes that incredibly winning relationship with Cleo.

Here's what I learned watching SUICIDE SQUAD: If you're going to do backstory work in your series or feature, you want it to work like a time-release capsule. It's not information that happened in the past, but something which is very much impacting the present. 

MUSICAL WEEK II: SUICIDE SQUAD KNOWS HOW TO SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE HARLEY QUINN

Okay so maybe SUICIDE SQUAD does not seem like your typical musical--though it does have writer/director James Gunn's typically skillful needle drops, as well as a sequence for Harley that Gunn himself saw as veering into MARY POPPINS territory. 

(By the way, SUICIDE SQUAD spoilers ahead. Beware.)

But there's a way in which good action movies do storytelling in ways similar to musicals. The action sequences stand in place of songs as the moments where the characters express who they are and what they want. (Also they often involve insane amounts of choreography.) 

So SQUAD's opening sequence with Michael Rooker's Savant and the ball may not be your typical musical opener, but it does tell us who he is and what he's feeling in the same way a character solo number would.   

(By the way, the choice to open on Savant and stay with him the first 15 minutes is such a great choice. In his interview with Variety Gunn reveals he pitched the film to Warner Brothers/DC in exactly that way, with them having no idea that there was a twist coming. A little master class in pitching right there.)

I don't want to push the musical/action movie comparison as much as distract you so that you won't mind me either spending a second week on American musicals because I am obsessed with them right now (thank you, SCHMIGADOON!) or taking a day from all that to write about SUICIDE SQUAD. 

How am I doing? 

There's a lot of smart storytelling things going on SUICIDE SQUAD.  The investment put into the fake team, backstory reveals that feel like time-release capsules, adding emotion and energy to the current story rather than ever pulling us out of it -- actually at some point this week I'm going to write about that, as well, because it's so well done and backstory work is so hard to do well. 

But the thing that really stood out to me is what the film does with Harley Quinn. 

Here's the thing: At this point Harley is way bigger than this movie and its characters. Even though this is only her third appearance in the DCEU, and the first was in the prior SUICIDE SQUAD film, that film absolutely launched her into Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman-adjacent territory. Some of it's Margot Robbie's glorious performance and some of it is just the character herself. She's insanely funny, totally unpredictable and yet also capable of profound poignancy. 

Bringing together a character like that with a bunch of nobodies is a recipe for disaster, even if one of them is played by Idris Elba. She draws all the attention, even when she's just standing there. With her around it's going to be very hard for the audience to ever fall in love with the other characters.

So, Gunn makes the brilliant choice to give her her own story completely separate from the rest of the team for over half the film. She attacks Corto Moltese with the meant-to-fail Team A, gets caught and then ends up first wooed by the country's new president and then tortured by the General that replaces him. It's just two sequences, each of them among the most musical-inspired of the film (man, I am really leaning this musical/action movie comparison, aren't I?). 

We get an animated Disney-eque Shopgirl wooed by the Prince sequence, complete with birds (and the wish fulfillment ending that so many have about Disney princess films -- YOU DON'T NEED THOSE MEN, LADIES; YOU ARE SO MUCH MORE ON YOUR OWN). Then we get her escape from torture sequence that as it goes on begins to transform the world around her in a way that is indeed very psychadelic-POPPINS or FANTASIA-esque.

Those two sequences prove to be enough time spent with Harley to satisfy us in large part because they are so memorable and visually arresting. But they also continue her broader DCEU storyline of breaking free from an abusive relationship with the Joker and figuring out who she wants to be. Murdering the President is her learning from her past mistakes. And then murdering the seeming fortress of men who tortured her speaks to her growing project as avenging angel of abused women.   

It's interesting, Gunn says in that interview he had no idea what BIRDS OF PREY was about when he wrote the SQUAD script, so there's a wonderful element of just plain serendipity in all this. But the three films do work very very well together as a story of Harley.

In a way what Gunn has done her is a variation on what Snyder did with Superman in his DC films. In "killing" Clark at the end of BATMAN v. SUPERMAN Snyder gave all the other characters in JUSTICE LEAGUE time and space to breathe and become characters that we would love in their own right. And then in the end he can come back and be the film's big gun, just as Harley is the one who literally vaults into Starro's eye, leading to their death. 

This may sound very feature-centric, but you see the same thing happen on TV shows. Something big or tragic will happen to the protagonist or a major character at the end of a season, launching them off on their own story in the next. And that becomes a way to give all the other characters room to develop further and get stories of their own. 

When people are loving your show and hungry for more stories of your supporting characters, it's a good question to consider: How can I take the protagonist off the table for a bit (without taking them out of the picture)?

MUSICAL WEEK: THE GREATEST SHOWMAN HIDES BEHIND ITS QUALO

My general premise in writing this blog is that you can learn a ton about how to write well by looking at how others write well. 

But we also learn from others' mistakes/things we don't like when we see them. I don't like to dig into all that too much, because making any kind of art whether good or bad is damn hard. And usually even in a film you don't like you can find some element that you do.

THE GREATEST SHOWMAN has great choreography and some tremendous performers. But watching it for the first time I just could not find much about the story that seemed to work for me. P.T. Barnum's storyline--poor guy promises his rich fiance everything, then chases after it way past what she needs and almost loses her in the end--is entirely familiar. 

And at the same time the script repeatedly breaks both its own rules and some of the fundamental rules of storytelling. Barnum's wife Charity, who spends the whole film being there for him saying she's doesn't need more, she's happy with him, leaves him so fast when press photos show him kissing songstress Jenny Lind on stage there should be a cartoon puff of smoke behind her. She won't wait for an explanation, 100% trusts the press that has been tearing down her husband all along.

And then, of course, basically one long scene later--which we'll get to--she's back with him, the entire matter forgotten. It does a great disservice to her (very winning) character and shows the hand of the writer treating the characters like chess pieces. 

Even worse is the treatment of the circus members. Having helped empower them at the start, Barnum then hides them in the back of the room during his "I'm super legit you guys, I brought this pretty British singer" concert. And as if that were not insulting enough, he then literally refuses to let them come to the reception, pushing them away from the door and shutting it behind them. 

 It is a seriously fucked up move, which should be a great thing storywise. We love it when a protagonist does something really terrible. Big, bad choices build the mountain the hero has to then climb to fix things. 

Except that doesn't happen here. Barnum never has to pay for what he's done to his cast members. He suffers losses, yes, but they've got nothing to do with the specific terrible things he's done and said to his performers. Storytelling isn't math, but the burdens you put on a character still need to match to the choices they've made, or it all just seems random.

At what should be his moment of reckoning with those performers, rather than confront him for what he's done to them, the script asks them to encourage him to believe in himself again so that they can have their circus back. It not only ignores Barnum's prior acts, in other words, but creates another moment of humiliation for the marginalized, this time done to them by the writers. After slowly building out the idea that they are each beautiful people of their own, to be valued and loved, in the end they're just vehicles for the straight white dude's self-realization. 

"The Qualo" is my term for the use of queer characters to redeem or save a straight one. A straight character can be absolutely monstrous or just off base, but if they've got a gay friend or queer/marginalized characters who accept them anyway it doesn't matter. The queer characters' Halo shines on them and so all is well. 

It's a technique we see happening not just with queer characters but women and minorities. And it's deeply messed up, insofar as it involves taking communities who are historically marginalized and using them to solve the problems of the most privileged, thereby reinforcing the prejudices and hierarchies of those privileged people. 

In the case of SHOWMAN, the problem that the queer-facing characters are asked to solve for Barnum is literally their own dehumanization by him. They're made by the writers to put aside what he's done to them without even getting to express a word of it to him. They have their big midpoint song empowering themselves--a high point of the film--but in terms of dealing with Barnam they're asked to simply adapt a wise beneficence--Oh honey, we've already seen it all, this is nothing. But that idea is itself a trope of the majority meant to teach its victims silence.

The musical has some great songs! It has a lot of fun dancing! It has Zendaya! But it also begs questions for us in our writing: What roles do I assign to minority characters and women in my scripts? Do they have stories of their own, or are they there to serve the straight/white/male characters? 

More generally, do I let my protagonist solve their own problems, climb the mountain they made with their choices, or do I let them off the hook? 

MUSICAL WEEK: CHICAGO KNOWS HOW TO OPEN

This is turning into Kander & Ebb & Fosse week, I know, but damn do they know how to tell a story. 

I saw CHICAGO on Broadway some years ago. It's been there forever, and as a result tickets are cheap, which usually means the show isn't going to be great. But my God, it was. It's got such electricity. If you come to New York once Broadway reopens and you've never seen it, give yourself a treat. Don't worry if there are no big names in it. You will not regret it.

The movie, which came out in 2002 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture--the first musical to do that since OLIVER! in 1968--is surprisingly able to capture the stage experience. Honestly, I can't think of another movie musical that actually feels so much like you're at the theater itself. Some of that might be the  vaudeville staging of the show itself, but I don't think so. Usually when you shoot a staged experience for film it actually loses some of that sense of spontaneity. I suspect much of it is the special alchemy of the show itself, as translated to the screen by the great Rob Marshall and Bill Condon. 

That, and a technique that the creative team creates specifically for the movie, the parallel editing throughout the film between the musical numbers and the actual events going on in Roxie Hart's life. The film opens on a push in on Roxie's eye (that's the image above). As we get tight into the black of the iris suddenly little sparkles appear, which then become the "C" in the title. 

Although we have no idea whose this eye is yet, or what this story is about, that one moment, that simple push, is the whole film in a nutshell. CHICAGO will tell the story of Roxie Hart, a woman who sees the dark world around her and inside her and fill it with shimmering vaudeville lights. We open on Velma Kelly doing her act and just killing it, while Roxie watches. And then in virtually every successive scene, the story is told via a combination of the real life events--her husband Amos saying he killed Fred, her press conference, the courtroom trial--and the vaudeville reimaginings of those moments by Roxie.

It's a brilliant technique that works on multiple levels. It keeps the film from feeling like a series of standalone stage performances--a frequent problem in movie version of musicals; and it does so by making each of these performances a way of expressing what's going on inside Roxie, how she's dealing with the actual events of the film.

One of my favorite examples of this is just after the midpoint, where Roxie has decided she doesn't need Billy Flynn's help, then watches as the one innocent woman on Murderess' Row, the Hungarian Katalin Helinszki, loses her appeal and is hung. The story intercuts between Katalin walking to her death and her on stage doing a disappearing act. At the crucial moment of her death Roxie imagines her leaping off a platform and vanishing, not dead but free. Everything Roxy wants and fears is all right there. 

The technique of constantly reinterpreting events through her eyes is also a brilliant way of making us care about Roxie. At the very beginning of the film she's a kid with the stars in her eyes, which is always appealing for an audience. She's us.

But in the scenes that follow, Roxie is pathetic. She's a cheat and a murderer and not terribly good at either. What makes us like her is the way she fills the emptiness of her world and life with color and humor and passion. In a way it's like a more commanding, self-propelled, I will have the life that I want version of THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY.

You actually don't need that opening shot to establish the way the film is going to work. We can completely understand what's happening without it. It's a flourish. 

But in a way that's what an opening is for--to reach beyond plot and character to reveal the story's artistic and maybe thematic aspirations. It's planting a flag, establishing one's ambitions and making a promise that the story you're about to watch is going to be just as fucking great and interesting as this moment we're having right here at the start. 

You see this kind of technique of making the opening A Thing used more in film than in television. TV tends to look more to final images--end of the pilot, end of an episode, end of a season, and especially end of a series. 

But some of the very best television shows--like BREAKING BAD, BETTER CALL SAUL, THE SOPRANOS, MAD MEN--also frequently consider opening images. And I would say part of why we love those shows so much is precisely because of that fact that they go that extra mile and dig into what is the more interesting/bold/evocative/thematically relevant way of opening this episode/season/scene. 

Whether you're writing a pilot or an episode, it's always worth considering: What is my opening image? And how can I make it relate in an interesting way to what is to come in the episode or season? 

MUSICALS WEEK: CABARET HEARS THE MUSIC PLAY

 

Believe it or not, I had never seen CABARET until the other night. 

I know, take away my card and pray that Judy curse me with a lack of pitch forever. It's a great score and a very, very good film. CABARET won 8 Oscars in 1973, including director Bob Fosse beating out Francis Ford Coppola for the goddamn GODFATHER. 

And the thing is, it's a pretty simple story. The backdrop is the Nazis starting to come into power in Germany, but the focus is entirely on the love story between the American cabaret performer who wants to see her name up in lights Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) and British grad student Brian Roberts (Michael York). 

In part, that's the greatest writing lesson CABARET has to teach: Keep it simple. Complex is rarely the same as profound.

But the thing that I keep coming back to is the ending of the film, which I will now spoil, so if you haven't seen it and don't want it ruined, mayhaps turn your head. 

Sally, who has gotten pregnant and accepted Brian's proposal of marriage, decides instead to terminate the pregnancy. She knew, had they had that baby and gotten married, neither one of them would be happy.  So she gives him the freedom to move on and herself as well. 

Somewhere in my screenwriting education a teacher told us there are four basic endings to a film: 

• The character gets what they want and it's the best, huzzah! 
• The character gets what they want and it turns out to be not what they need at all, wah wah. 
• The character doesn't get what they want and it's too bad. Sad! 
• Or the character doesn't get what they want and it turns out to be for the best. Hurray!

In CABARET, we get two different endings at the same time: Brian doesn't get what he wants, wah wah. And Sally does, but also wah wah because she loves Brian and her choice leaves her stuck at the cabaret. 

So, tragedy all around, right? 

Maybe, if the film had ended there. But instead we go back to the Kit Kat Club where Sally works, and she gets to do one more number, the title track. It's an upbeat number about getting out of the house and going to the cabaret, which given what she's just given up feels like it could be ironic and bittersweet.

But instead the performance seems to help her discover again who she is and what she wants. The longer she goes, the more alive she becomes. 

So in a sense the film gives her three of the four possible endings--she gets what she wants and what she has to sacrifice is sad; but then also in the very end she's happy with that; and yet it's not what she wanted really, not the big career in a massive theater but a room full of drunks at a cabaret, and yet she's realized she's still great with that.  

 For me the writing note is this: Give yourself permission to explore the space around your ending a little before you call it said and done. Or to put another way that probably many writing teachers will shriek at, Don't end the story when you think it's over. End it after you think it is. 

Give your character a chance to live out the resolution of their story. Let's see them in their new "state", having won or lost and happy or sad about it. Maybe it's material that in the end you will decide isn't really necessary. But you never know: maybe there's one more turn still waiting to be had in that final scene  for them and for us.

MUSICALS WEEK: SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE INVESTS IN A HAT

Tonight James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim are chatting along with Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin and Christine Baranski about the making of SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. (You can still get tickets here!) Lapine just put out an oral history of the making of the show, and it's bound to be a fascinating conversation.

If you're not familiar with the show, the first act tells the story of the artist Georges Seurat and his model/lover Dot as he's painting his famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. You've seen it before. 

The second act takes place 100 years later, and concerns his descendant, a sculptor/inventor who is stuck artistically and emotionally and finds new freedom in a visit to the site of Seurat's work. It's a show about being an artist and the challenges of relationship and creativity.

It's also a show about what is on the surface a pretty unlikable guy. Georges is ultra-controlling and more than a little cruel toward Dot. It's worth watching the first act just to see how Lapine and Sondheim endear us to him. They use two techniques, really: first, they start us with Dot, who is funny and beautiful and adores this guy despite how frustrating he can be. It's a great tip: If you want to make us care about a character, have someone else that we love adore them. 

Second, the musical slowly lets us into his point of view on everything. We get him singing his colors as he paints, and just like that his obsessiveness becomes not a flaw but a point of fascination, a doorway into his imagination that only expands as the show goes on. Giving us glimpses into his mindset also reveals that he knows the pain he causes and what he is losing when Dot leaves him, which effectively transforms his actions from callous to tragic. 

So yeah, great character work to look at in that first act. 

But there's another technique here that you see sometimes in great screenwriting. Lapine and Sondheim concretize Georges' general obsession with getting every little detail right in a hat that someone is wearing. He refuses to go the Follies with Dot, losing her, because he has to finish the hat. Just the choice to do that, to ground Georges' obsession in one object, is a great writing choice. It puts flesh on the bone. 

But then, at the start of Act II we get this wild limbo where all the people we met in Act I that Georges painted now sing about being trapped in his painting on a permanently hot day forever. It parallels the start of Act I, when Dot was complaining about the heat while she poses for Georges, but now it's this whole group of people that is upset. And near the end, Dot takes a step back from her own frustrations to thank Georges for, among other things, giving her a hat. The hat Georges was so obsessed with all along proves to be this gift he wanted her to have. And suddenly this is all of us aka me: 

You know Daryl loves SUNDAY. 

When you give emphasis to an object in a story, you endow it with power. And anything you do with that object after the fact ends up offering a greater emotional wallop as a result. The thing I love about SUNDAY is that it gives no hint that this turn is coming. It doesn't need to come; the hat has already served its purpose by being that part of Georges' drivenness that can represent the whole. 

I'm eager to learn whether the idea was always there to bring the hat back in this new way. I feel like so often in early drafts of scripts we bury treasure without knowing it. One of the greatest parts about being a writer is finding those treasures and realizing there's so much more there still to use.