Script-Doctoring The Station Agent

Thomas McCarthy's offbeat, low-budget (under $500,000) drama, The Station Agent, is a bit of an enigma. The 2003 film won numerous awards (critics and judges lavished praise on it), 90% of people on rottentomatoes.com liked it (average rating 3.9/5), and yet I didn't find it to be all that magical; I give it three stars, tops. Does it exude charm? Most definitely. Are the performances good? Hell yes, they're better than good. (So is the cinematography.) But somehow, long portions of the movie seemed to drag; the funny parts weren't laugh-out-loud funny; the plot was threadbare; my thoughts wandered as I watched. I wanted to come away laughing or crying or moved in some way. But it's not that kind of story.

What kind of story is it? The logline is suitably quirky: Two loners (Joe and Olivia) try to befriend an antisocial dwarf (Finbar McBride, sensitively played by Peter Dinklage) who has inherited an abandoned train station in Newfoundland, New Jersey.

Joe, Olivia, and Fin watch a movie in The Station Agent.

Bitter and reclusive, tired of living the wee life in a world of Big People, four-foot-five-inch Finbar moves into the ramshackle station, making it his own special locomotive-geek bachelor pad. But he can't get away from the young Cuban-American man, Joe (played by Bobby Cannavale), who operates a hot dog truck near the abandoned station. (We're never told how it is a person can make a living operating a lunch truck at an abandoned station where no train ever stops.)

While walking to town, Finbar almost gets struck by a swerving Jeep; he thus meets Olivia Harris (played by Patricia Clarkson), a thirty-something woman who lost her only child in a playground accident two years ago and is now separated from her husband.

For a while, it seems as if Fin and Olivia will hit it off and become An Item, but they never do. Instead, she wants to reconcile with her husband (but finds out much later that he's already impregnated his girlfriend). Fin also meets a young librarian, and has a tender moment with her; but alas, she's pregnant by her redneck boyfriend, and she goes back to him (or disappears from the film, at least).

There's a bit of bonding between Fin and Joe, but frankly the Joe character is mostly an irritation (to Fin and the moviegoer) and only barely attains "true friend" status at the end of the story. He's good-natured; you want to like him; but he's extraordinarily immature for a grown man. He makes the characters in Saturday Night Fever seem complex, multidimensional.

What the movie needs is a good train wreck, whether kinetic (i.e., literal) or metaphorical. (I'd take either.) Joe's life is mysteriously thin (he's as complex, emotionally, as a 10-year-old boy); apparently he has no college loans to pay, no wife or child to feed, nothing to do with his time but hang out at the station all day. Olivia's life is full of pathos, but it's latent, rarely overt. Who are these people? Where are the raging crises in their lives? Olivia lost her son two full years ago; it's in the past; her husband is not the kind of husband any sane woman would want to reconcile with. Where's the tension? There isn't any. I'm sorry.

The main character's arc takes him from bitter and antisocial to less bitter and quasi-social (but still without a love life). That's hardly a satisfying journey.

How to fix this mess? First, make all three main characters' lives train wrecks. Not only that, actually have Joe hang his head at one point and call his life a train wreck so that Fin (the locomotive-history uber-nerd and consummate train-lover) can say: "Please don't ever say that in my presence."

Joe: "What? What'd I say? You mean . . . train wreck??"

Fin: "Please. It's . . . repugnant."

Joe (whose first language is Spanish) gives a no-comprende shrug.

"Re-pug-nant. It means repulsive. Extremely distressing."

This sets up "train wreck" as a metaphor that can be used throughout the movie, while also potentially setting up a funny moment some time later on, when Olivia can slip "train wreck" into conversation (innocently), whereupon both Joe and Fin stare at her and simultaneously say: "Don't ever say that." (Then Joe, on his own: "It's repugnant.")

Writer-director McCarthy took pains to show a scene in which the local-store cashier/owner whips her cell phone out to take a picture of Fin while he's walking around in the store (because apparently, this 50-year-old woman has never seen a dwarf before, in her entire life). Okay, we get it, people treat dwarves like freaks. Unfortunately, McCarthy misses a great opportunity to lend resonance to the store scene later on, when Fin, in a drunken rage, stands on a bar stool in a crowded saloon and yells at people to "Go ahead, look at me." What he should, of course, have done is yell: "Get your camera out, okay? Take a goddam picture." At first, no one moves, but Fin (in my rewrite; if I were script-doctoring this thing) shames the crowd into actually getting their cell phones out. He forces them to take actual pictures of him.

That's not all. Bear in mind, there's a hugely important redemption scene near the end of the movie when Fin, glad to be alive after a near-death experience, finds the nerve to stand in front of an elementary-school class (one kid asks how tall he is) to give a talk about trains. The barroom scene could have given the classroom scene a bit of much-needed resonance if it (the bar scene) had ended with Fin (duly photographed by the shamed saloon crowd) stepping down from the bar stool and saying (angrily, of course) "Thank you. Class dismissed . . ." as he storms out of the bar. Later on, during the classroom scene, we could have Fin allow a local newspaper reporter (newspapers being a symbol, incidentally, for well-past-their-glory-days 19th-century technology, like trains) to take a picture of him with kids gathered around him. The next day, Joe, Olivia, and Fin (or any combination of two of them) could be looking at the picture in the morning paper, commenting positively on it, etc. 

Note: The camera is a potentially powerful metaphor in any movie; it's the physical incarnation of voyeurism (which in turn is a powerful motif in cinema).

Fin's closeness with Olivia could have been better exploited. They could have cuddled/rubbed faces, on the bed, fully clothed; then CUT TO an outdoor scene (continuous, night) looking at the bedroom window from outside; we see the light go out (suggesting that more may have then happened on the bed). But we FADE TO a morning indoor scene where we see the two spooning, still fully clothed, atop the still-undisturbed bed, Fin looking like a pearl inside an oyster with Olivia holding him from behind.

I can think of a lot of seemingly little (but potentially important in the aggregate) fluorishes that would have made us care more about the characters (without resorting to the cheap tactic of making them have sex with each other)—quite possibly making for a more satisfying (for me, anyway) film experience. With a little work, The Station Agent could have been even better than it is already. That's not to take credit away from Thomas McCarthy, however. Few people these days can shoot an award-winning, highly profitable (well over $8 million gross) drama for under half a million dollars. That's magic of a pretty high order. Far be it for me to suggest otherwise.

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Verticality

In studying screenwriting, I'm struck time and again by how many tricks of good screenwriting can be carried over to traditional fiction writing (stories, novels, novellas), often to the great benefit of the latter.

A common complaint about bad screenplays is that they're a lot of work to read, because the author spends too much time in flowery descriptive narrative. You can tell when you're reading one of these scripts: It takes you two minutes—instead of 30 or 40 seconds—to get through a page. (Once you've read some really fine scripts, and felt their rhythm, you can sense the snail-like rhythm of a "stinker" script instantly.)

Page 2 of the Alien script (shooting version).

In the screenwriting world, we say that bogged-down scripts often lack verticality. (Charles Deemer gives an excellent summary in his post on "Making Scripts Vertical.") The idea comes down to this: Your eye spends an awful lot of time, in a slow-moving piece of writing, simply going from left to right (LTR), parsing word by word through one sentence after another after another. (Obviously I'm talking about English and other alphabetic/LTR languages.) This is what one might call horizontality; it's the basis of all alphabetic-LTR writing, because letters and words occur sequentially. But every once in a while, your eye gets to drop down vertically on the page—when there's a new paragraph, a subhead, a section break, a new chapter heading, an inserted block quote, a bulleted list, etc. Anything that makes your eye drop down is verticality.

Your brain keeps track of the ratio of verticality to horizontality. It begins to ache after a while if there's not enough verticality.

Horizontality is tiring. Why? Because it's linear, and that's not how cognition works. Processing linear text requires a highly specialized area of the brain. Perception (involving the senses of the body in conjunction with the whole brain) results from experiences taken in episodically, not always in a particular order, as a collage of disjoint bits that may include memories, ideas, emotions, smells, sounds, what have you.

Many of the great art movements of the early twentieth century can be understood in the context of an escape from the shackles of linearity. A photo, like a reaistic painting, maps one area of light or dark (in the photo) to a similar area in the subject; in fact the verb "map" implies linearity of just this sort. Impressionism attempts to break from linearity so as to allow the brain to do what it does best: assemble meaning from disjoint bits. Likewise, a common stylistic trope of postmodern fiction is the telling of a tale as a pastiche of disconnected and not always time-ordered pieces. This sort of storytelling (think The English Patient) engages the brain in a different way than straight narrative, often to stunning effect, since nonlinear processing centers of the brain are enlisted in the attempt to render the overall meaning.

If you have any doubt as to how hard (cognitively speaking) linear, horizontal writing is for the brain, try reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On the Road (available in the 50th anniversary edition from Viking/Penguin), the version that reflects Kerouac's original rendering of the story as a single long paragraph. Somewhere around ten pages into the 300-page-long paragraph, you'll be wishing for an indent, a section break, or some other "break" from linearity. The single-long-paragraph device takes getting used to.

Screenplays are intrinsically highly verticalized. They're broken up into short pieces that vary a great deal in terms of indents and margins. Thus they tend to be much easier to read quickly than a novel. But (as I said earlier) even among screenplays, there are those that read easily and those that feel like work.

Take, for example, the following bit of narrative, adapted from Alien:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert, each wearing gloves, boots, and jackets, enter the air lock. All three are carrying laser pistols. As Kane touches a button, a servo begins to whine and the inner door quietly slides shut; then the trio pull on their helmets.

That's not how the scene appears in the final version of the script (written by Walter Hill and David Giler, based on an earlier screenplay by Dan O'Bannon). Here's how the script was written:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the lock.
All wear gloves, boots, jackets.
Carry laser pistols.
Kane touches a button.
Servo-whine.
Then the inner door slides quietly shut.
The trio pull on their helmets.

Telegraphic; staccato; almost poem-like. The "before" version is what you'd read in a novel (or a not-so-great screenplay). The second version, from the Hill-Giler script, is experiential, sensory in its telling. Two entirely different ways of handling the same content; two ways for the brain to process the information.

In your novel (you know, that one you've been working on all month?), before you get too tied up in Proustian 900-word sentences and Pynchonesque paragraphs that ramble on for pages, have a regard for the cognitive load imposed by linearity. Consider introducing a little more verticality.

Lighten the load.

Your reader will thank you.

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Fixing a Mediocre Movie

If ever it were possible (which it seldom is) for sublime acting to elevate an otherwise unremarkable film to the status of a minor classic, it surely would have happened in the case of The Last Station, the well-intentioned 2009 Tolstoy biopic that brought Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (but no wins) to Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren for their commanding portrayals of Leo and Sofya Tolstoy. The performances were genuinely excellent. Alas, the movie was not. It's fair to ask why not, because on the surface, you'd think any movie about the life of the greatest international celebrity of the 19th century (which Tolstoy surely was) couldn't fail to be a compelling tale. But sadly, like Tolstoy's own final journey by rail, The Last Station falls far short of its ultimate destination, leaving the passenger (the moviegoer) stranded and wanting for a place to hang his or her shapka, so to speak.

The ingredients are there: strong characters, conflict, intrigue, deception, drama. Leo Tolstoy, at age 81, was trying desperately to simplify his increasingly complex professional and family life. He had long since signed over his worldly possessions (including the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana) to the care of his wife. But he also secretly conspired, with the aid of his devoted disciple, Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, to concoct a secret will that would have his literary properties go to the public domain. Of course, Sofya was no fool and saw through her husband's multiple attempts to write her out of the literary inheritance. The Last Station is the story of Sonya's descent into near-madness (and Leo's final, abortive attempt to escape the madness) as Chertkov wrests control of the Tolstoy literary legacy from Sonya. Leo boards a train, at the end, seeking to put physical distance (as much of it as possible) between himself and his wife. By the time he reaches Astapovo, the last station on the rail line, he is deathly ill with pneumonia. His wife arrives at Astapovo just in time to see him die.

The problem with The Last Station, as a movie, is that writer-director Michael Hoffman (working from Jay Parini's novel) chose to give us an extremely narrow snapshot of an enormous subject, more or less like trying to capture the Grand Canyon with a 1952 Brownie camera. The movie not only doesn't try to give us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life, it's actually happy to focus in on just a few weeks (the final weeks) of the great man's story. What's worse, the story is told through the eyes of a rather insignificant character, Tolstoy's replacement secretary (replacing N. N. Gusev, who was for a short time imprisoned), the young Valentin Bulgakov. Along the way, we're made to suffer through Bulgakov's own irrelevant romance with a young woman who's in no way related to Tolstoy (nor any other real-world character).

The movie thus fails on several levels. It fails, first, in not giving us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life. It merely presents the 81-year-old master to us as a world celebrity, ready-made, and expects us to bring significant knowledge of Tolstoy's backstory with us. The movie also distracts us from the main story by (as I said) forcing us to watch an utterly forgettable romantic side-plot that never intersects the main plot. But the movie also fails to show off the true main character of any movie (of whatever scope) about any great Russian writer: namely, Mother Russia herself.

It may be unfair to compare a movie of The Last Station's modest aspirations (and equally modest budget: $17 million) with David Lean's unforgettable cinematic rendition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which cost $11 million in 1965 dollars), but the fact is, no one who has seen Doctor Zhivago will fail, consciously or unconsciously, to make the comparison in his or her mind between the Lean movie and any subsequent movie involving an iconic Russian figure. The striking thing (one of many) about Doctor Zhivago is that at no time in the movie can the viewer be unaware of the looming presence of that "other main character," bigger than life, Russia herself. Unfortunately, and crucially, we lose that essential character in The Last Station, and without it, the story of Tolstoy's final weeks seems like little more than thin domestic farce.

It's easy to spew out criticism. How to fix it? What could the writer-director have done to rescue The Last Station from the clutches of mediocrity (aside from rewriting it as a stage play)? In particular, how could it have been improved without expanding the story into a Zhivago-like epic spanning the whole of Tolstoy's life?

I think first of all it's necessary (and sufficient, for this limited-budget film) to tell the story of Tolstoy's last ten years, rather than his final year. By dispensing with the trivial Bulgakov character (and his meaningless romance) we save many feet of film that could be better put to use telling the story through the eyes of Tolstoy's personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, a decidedly pivotal figure in the drama.

The (rewritten) story opens 24 February 1901, at a train station in St. Petersburg, where nameless nobodies come and go, among them a young nobody who, while waiting for his train, carefully (which is to say, first looking to see that no one is watching him) slides a book out of his coat and begins to read it. The book: a copy of Tolstoy's banned The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

A nearby church bell tolls. We cut to the interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady (St. Petersburg) where a grave-looking Metropolitan Anthony ascends the pulpit to read the document officially excommunicating Count Lev Nickolayevich Tolstoy from the Orthodox Church.

Cut to a villa at Gaspra, on the Black Sea. It's September 1901. At the insistence of his physician, Tolstoy has come to Crimea to recuperate from malaria. He's joined at the seaside villa not only by his family but by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. (All of this is true, by the way.)

Chekhov, shaking his head, looks up from his newspaper. "It's been seven months, Lev Nickolayevich, and they're still writing about the excommunication!"

At the time of his death in 1910, Tolstoy was arguably the
best-known celebrity in the world.

At this point, there is ample room to discuss the reasons for the excommunication. Tolstoy has been writing books and tracts (most famously, The Kingdom of God Is Within You) blasting the church's version of Christianity, putting forth his own no-nonsense, no-miracles, no-hocus-pocus version of the Gospels, emphasizing the Sermon on the Mount and its call for turning the other cheek and repudiating violence. Tolstoy has turned Jesus's teachings against the church, by pointing out that no one who advocates violence (even in a just cause) is adhering to Jesus's teachings.

Tolstoy's own fundamentalism has not only gotten him in hot water with the Church (and the Tsar), it has spawned a Christian anarchism movement that has, by 1901, circled the globe. In Russia, believers in Tolstoy's version of Christianity are refusing military service in significant numbers. In England and elsewhere, acolytes have formed "Tolstoyan colonies." One of Tolstoy's most ardent followers, at home, is (of course) Vladimir Chertkov, who will remain a lifelong disciple, creating the first English-language editions of Tolstoy's works and publishing inexpensive editions of his books both in England and in Russia (resulting in ten years of exile for Chertkov).

Tolstoy's religious fervor, seen by his wife as incomprehensible, is ultimately what powers the bond with Chertkov, the rift with Sofya, and Tolstoy's own mad quest to shed worldly belongings before he dies. By making this aspect of Tolstoy's life clear, The Last Station (properly remade) could give life to the motivations of its characters and make clear why so many Russians considered Tolstoy a living saint.

As part of his creed, Tolstoy advocated celibacy, vegetarianism, and repudiation of worldly goods. He strongly agreed with Proudhon that "property is theft." Once this fact is known, it becomes possible, in a remake of The Last Station, to put Tolstoy's philosophy in historical context. Thus it becomes relevant to include in such a movie a scene (for example) of the 150,000 people who marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905. These were not card-carrying Bolsheviks but ordinary people, many of whom had been inspired by Tolstoy's (not just Marx's) philosophy.

I can think of many powerful scenes that would make sense in a film that attempts to capture Tolstoy's final decade rather than his final six months of life. By slavishly adhering to Parini's novel, screenwriter-director Hoffman reinquished any opportunity he might have had to do the Tolstoy story justice in The Last Station. We end up with melodrama instead of drama, narrow provinciality instead of sweeping grandeur, and poor Mother Russia herself reduced to a forgotten stepsister, when in fact the stage—like the characters—could not, in this case, have possibly been any bigger.

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Lessons from the Script

The screenplay draft is complete. It ended up at 114 pages rather than 112. Boo hoo.

Here's some of what I've learned so far.

The books all say that screenwriting is hard. And it is. IMHO, it's harder than poetry. Makes writing a novel seem like a stroll on the beach.

Screenwriting is a lot like a stroll on the beach—Omaha Beach.

In his book On Writing (a fine book, BTW), Stephen King talks about how he develops stories. Basically, he creates interesting characters, puts them in a dramatic situation, and lets them figure it out. There is no conscious attempt to plot or create subplots; the characters do what they must, inevitably (given their proclivities and their situation) do. King merely transcribes. He gets all the way through a novel this way; following the headlights all the way to the destination, so to speak.

It works for King because he's a master at what he does, and the form (the novel) allows it.

Screenwriting is so constraint-intensive, there is precious little room (although there is some) for organic story growth. You almost have to come at it with a complete structure in mind. Screenwriter Matt Bird has a story structure checklist (encompassing character development and all sorts of other things) that's 100+ items long. You're not going to hit even a third of the points in that list using an unprepared "structure it as you go" approach. If you can, well, congratulations; maybe you're channeling Robert Towne; in which case please accept my unworthy bow as I exit stage-left.

Alien would work well as a silent movie. The dialog augments the story.

You'll run out of room. Guaranteed. Budget 32 pages for Act I and you'll go sailing through that mark like a drunk through a stop sign. Set an absolute page limit of 110 and you'll be at 120 before you know it.

Therefore the best advice I can give you is: Enlarge all margins and tab limits at the start, just a smidge, so you'll get fewer words per page. You'll gladly kill any number of grandmothers later to widen them out again.

Another tip that may keep you from busting your page count: One day when you're thoroughly blocked, write the ending. Write the final two scenes (more, if you can) of the script, complete. Behold: Your "active writing area" is now bookended by the already-written beginning and the already-in-place ending. You have less surface area in which to work, and the paint dries faster, forcing you to up the pace. Which you were wanting to do anyway, right?

Thirty pages seems like a lot in the beginning. But when you've got just thirty pages left to write, it's never enough.

Let actions and situations do the talking whenever possible. Let characters speak only if and when they must, and even then, let subtext, not the actual words, tell the story.

Never forget one thing. Watching a movie is an act of voyeurism. Hence, all dialog is overheard. Hence, no conversation needs to begin at the beginning. Think of the times you've overheard a conversation (whether at a bar, a social function, standing in line, or whatever) in real life. Did you ever hear the actual start of the conversation? Chances are you came along in the middle. Yet within a few seconds, you figured out the essentials of the conversation (who, what, where, when, why) from context. That's how all movie dialog works. The film viewer is an eavesdropper, not a court stenographer.

Take a scene, any scene. Cut the first line of dialog. Does the scene still work? Yes? Then why did you ever think you needed that line of dialog?

More often than not, dialog is about subtext, backstory, misdirection, and/or foreshadowing, not just what's going on at the moment. We can see what's going on at the moment.

Dialog, properly done, wears a hairpiece. It's never bald.

It helps to know something about stage magic and its crazy stepsister, comedy. Both are all about misdirection.

Would your script still make for a good moviegoing experience with the sound off? Alien would play damn well as a silent movie. My Dinner with Andre would not. Look at your script with dialog turned off (in your head, at least). Which did you write? Alien, or My Dinner with Andre?

I was fortunate, with the script I just wrote, to have a multinational story, with lots of non-English-speaking characters (but zero subtitles, thanks). Try it sometime. Write a scene that involves foreign nationals, speaking their native tongues, using no subtitles, with the idea that the scene has to be understandable to anyone, of any language. See how far you can take it. Can you still make the scene work? Why or why not?

There's more to tell. Suffice it to say, the screenplay-writing process has taught me a lot. And I thought I already knew a thing or two. I was right, as it turns out. I knew a thing. Maybe two at the most.


If you'd like to see my (WGA-registered) screenplay, drop me a line. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries held in strictest confidence. Please mention your Twitter handle (if applicable).

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