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 Sean Bean plays Tracie, and while some of the thinking around what it means to be trans is out of date at this point--such as the fact of having a straight man play a trans character--Bean's performance is tender and vulnerable.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.

MUSICALS WEEK: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH REVEALS CHARACTER IN SETTING

I'm in a musical theatre mood lately, and so I thought this week I'd take a stab and writing about some movie versions of musicals. 

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is a 1991 film written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell from his 1998 musical, with lyrics and compositions by Stephen Trask. It tells the story of the genderqueer East German Hedwig Robinson over two timelines: in the present she's a rock composer and performer trying to get credit for the songs she wrote that were stolen by her one time lover. And as she follows his tour from place to place, performing in restaurants, she tells us the story of her life. 

One element that I absolutely love about the film is the opportunities it finds in the contradiction between who Hedwig is a performer and where she's performing. The character is a goddamn star, someone who absolutely could walk into Madison Square Garden and light it up. But instead most of the film we find her playing the equivalent of Denny's and Pizza Hut, places where there sometimes isn't even a spot for her and her band to stand. 

On the surface this choice feels familiar. It's a trope of so many rock star movies, the star who should be able to have it all is stuck in the shitholes of the world performing for drunks.  

But Mitchell refuses to script it like that. Whether she's got her back up against a salad bar at a place where people are walking out or she's climbing over the tops of booths at a Jewish retirement home diner, Hedwig stays in the moment and engaged with the audience.

Without ever beating us over the head, that choice tells us a lot about her and her point of view on the world. First of all, she's a professional. She's also brave in a completely undramatic way. Many of these groups are unfriendly at least in part, and she does her thing anyway.

And lastly, she shows a fundamental respect for people. They can give up on her but she's not going to write them off--not only in the sense that she's still going to give them the show she agreed to, but she's still going to expose herself and share with them her life story. She's still going to give them the chance to be open and good.

We learn who a character is and we come to love them by way of the choices they make given the situations they confront (and create). The choice to place Hedwig in absurd settings is a great vehicle for humor. But it also becomes a quiet way of getting us on her side. We love her not because she "toughs it out", as in other rock films, but because she doesn't think of it like that at all. We love her because she loves what she's doing no matter who it's for, and also because on some level she shows a kind of magnanimity, "big heartedness", for them, whether they care about her or not.