Beyond the Frame

The Artistry and Craftsmanship of Screenwriting: 

When I consider a script, the quality of the craftsmanship is immediately indicated by the writer’s ability to balance deliberate language while allowing the story to be told without attempting to direct from the page.  Giving a character an action - he cried - is always better than giving them a thought - he felt sad.  Giving the location essential details - the old house creaks with every step - is better than writing about its essence - the house is eerie.  

Well, I violate all those rules in the treatment below.  Elements is a series of experimental short films where I attempt to go beyond the bounds of traditional cinematic narrative storytelling.  The animated gif above is an actual loop from the film.  I think it illustrates the feeling that the script is going after.

~ ü

If you’re inclined to see how I break the rules, I’ve included the aforementioned treatment below.  You’ll see it resembles prose more than it does screenwriting.

Also, here’s a link to the previous film in the Elements series.  

Without. Within. 

Elements • Winter 2012 

He crosses his shoelaces, winds one side underneath and pulls them tight with a single yank.  He forms a loop, rounds the second string behind it, forms a second loop and pulls it through.  One more yank.  The shoe is snug.  

He sits motionless.  Although he is filled with tension, it is so deep-seeded that he likely isn’t even aware.  His right leg bounces.  The old chair creaks along, asking for mercy.   The young man remembers his fiancé wrapped in the warm glow of the fireplace.  She is cutting out paper snowflakes.

The fire burns.  He stares at it with an empty look.  His arms ride along with his active leg.  He suddenly pushes off his thighs and shoots out of his chair.  He leaves his apartment and slams the door behind him.  The sound echoes through the sparse room.  The fireplace and lonesome chair do not react.

It’s winter outside.  Cold.  Inert.  The wind shakes the hibernating trees.  Almost nothing else moves.  The sky is a wash of grey.  Grey smoke bellows from a chimney and disappears into the grey sky.  The muddy earth offers a reprieve.  At least the brown is not grey.

But there is something to be seen in these spaces.  The emptiness is full of life waiting to happen.  The cracked ice floating on Lake Michigan is a sign of mercy.  The wind lifts the seagulls high above the earth.  The sun sits on the horizon.  The winter ebbs.  

He jogs through the bitter winter night.  His steps charge through the piles of snow.  His face reacts to the bite of the cold air.  He powers through it and, for one moment, forgets about what he has lost.  The momentary reprieve offers an opportunity to see things in a new light.  At this very instance, he is stopped by a startling sign: paper snowflakes dangle from the barren limbs of a tree.  They float effortlessly through the wind, like memories through the mind.  There is sudden new rush of meaning.  An opportunity to grow.  A cause to remember.  He carries her within him.  She is everywhere he goes, in everything he sees.  She is alive within him.

And suddenly, there is no longer snow.  Only a clear path remains.  Spring has come. 

Endings: 

An ending can make a film for me. I appreciate an ending that makes a statement. I don’t need those that tie up loose ends in a narrative.  An open-ended finale isn’t necessarily intriguing (like Steve McQueen’s Shame); a bleak ending isn’t necessarily effective (like von Trier’s Melancholia).  An ending should say something about the material of the film itself.  The most powerful endings are under-stated.  They are modest.  They are aware of their own power.  Sensationalism only works to undermine a great assertion.  We are small in the universe.  So is our plight.

With that being said, here are my favorite endings.  If you haven’t seen a film on this short list, I don’t believe this will spoil it for you.  Read on.

City Lights, Directed by Charlie Chaplin (1931) - We watch the heroine as her romantic dreams fizzle at the sight of Chaplin.  She is perplexed.  The only line she speaks is “You?” as Chaplin looks at her nervously, hoping that her new gift of sight does not make her blind to the love they once shared.  It says everything about how we judge people by the way they look rather than the content of their character.  In 1931.  In one word.  ”You?”  It is my favorite ending in cinema.

The Mirror, Directed by Andrei Tarkovksy (1975) - In a long dolly move, the camera crosses from a field rife with possibility into a dark forest.  The camera move itself is a fade to black.  As we cross the plain, a young child that stars in Tarkovksy’s reenactment of his youth lets out a primal yell.  You are well aware of how the possibility of youth becomes the entrapments of an adult.  It is a warning: unless we look into the mirror of our lives, we will always be trapped by who we were and it will not be possible to become who we want to be.

Munich, Directed by Steven Spielberg (2005) - I don’t care much for symbolism in films but this post-9/11 movie about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict was summed up beautifully in the final shot.  We, as the audience, get caught up with the right and wrong imbued within the characters of the film’s story.  But who did what to whom, who did it first, and what is a fair exercise of justice, is truly inconsequential.  There is something much larger at stake.  We see that in the still-standing Twin Towers.  It completely undermines the narrative of the past 2 hours and says that we must do the same in order to move into a civilized future.  

~ü

Paul Schrader’s heavily marked-up outline for “Raging Bull” for which he shared writing credit with Mardik Martin.

“It’s part of the oral tradition,” Mr. Schrader said of his process. “Rather than writing my way through an outline, I tell my way through, and then each time I tell it, I re-outline it.”

As the “Raging Bull” outline shows, Mr. Schrader had the thrust of each scene, as well as key lines of dialogue (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win.”) already worked out before he sat down to write. (Alas, we couldn’t tell from this image how much of Jake La Motta’s helpful description of how to cook a steak had been composed at this stage.)

Mr. Schrader also gave an estimated page length for each scene as well as a final count and a running tally of total pages, which he said was crucial for pacing.

“It’s very important to calibrate these events and when they’re happening,” he said. “Somebody says, ‘I don’t know why this scene doesn’t work,’ and you say to them: ‘It’s very simple. It should have happened 10 pages earlier. Then it would have worked.’”

The final shooting script for “Raging Bull” was “more or less” what was submitted, Mr. Schrader said, though Mr. De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese made further changes during filming. “The only way you could get a final draft of that screenplay,” Mr. Schrader said, “would be to transcribe it from the screen. As opposed to ‘Taxi Driver,’ which is actually quite close to the script.”

(Source: lettersofnote.com)