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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How to Make a Story More Visual

Screenwriters resort to a variety of tricks to make stories more visual. I'm convinced novelists should be taking advantage of some of the same tricks, because adding visuality to a story almost always improves it, whether we're talking about a novel, a short story, a screenplay, an epic poem, or what have you.

Suppose you've been tasked with writing a scene in which a reluctant hero has to seek the counsel of a seer or swami or guru. He wants the guru to tell him whether he's ready to accept the hero's challenge.

The reluctant hero has to go visit the guru at the guru's ashram. Except, the ashram is really an inner-city apartment. The question isn't what you will have the two characters say to each other. The question is what they'll do during the scene. Will they sit on the floor crosslegged and talk? (How boring would that be?) Will one sit before a chessboard, rearranging chess pieces while the other stands and chews gum? Will they sit together and stare at a Tarot deck, a ouija board, a crystal ball?

In The Matrix, the guru (the Oracle) isn't a robed, bearded sage (Obi-Wan) but a laid-back, middle-aged black woman baking cookies! That's your first clue: Use the unexpected. Make things have a different appearance than the reader (or viewer) might have been expecting. Sometimes you need to signal (visually) a person's role through costume or stature, directly and obviously (as with Darth Vader), but sometimes it's more effective to do the reverse: dress the powerful in rags, bedeck the unimportant in bejeweled regalia.

Gandhi meets the Queen of England. Who is well dressed? Who has more power over India? Ho Chi Minh meets General Westmoreland. Who's wearing peasant attire? Who's winning the war?

In The Matrix, the Oracle bakes cookies, smokes cigarettes, reads Neo's palm. Neo mostly stands around and does nothing, although, significantly, he breaks a vase early in the scene. He also notices a sign over the doorway ("Know Thyself"). You might ask yourself why the scene was written to take advantage of chocolate chip cookies, cigarettes, palm-reading, a broken vase, and a sign over a doorway in a kitchen. Are these all "just props," or do they contain messages, meanings, special connotations? Ask yourself how you would have written the scene.

It's interesting that in a later Matrix movie, there's a similar scene, in which Neo gets to visit The Architect. It's one of the most laughably ineffective scenes in movie history. Why? The Architect just sits dispassionately in a chair and goes off on a bizarrely abstruse, esoteric soliloquy about the meaning and origin of The Matrix, while Neo looks at TV images of himself. This is an example of a "dialog" scene done poorly, done non-visually. The only "visual" is the wall of TV monitors, which instantly comes across as as sterile and gimmicky. The Architect's speech is totally forgettable. It's memorable for its ludricrousness. In this scene, instead of a picture painting a thousand words, we have a guy in a chair speaking a thousand words, saying nothing.

The scene in which The Architect drones on, semi-coherently, about the design of The Matrix is
arguably one of the most laughable non-comedy scenes in major motion picture history.

In making a scene work visually, you have a number of tools at your disposal, including setting, costumes, props, situations/actions, and the choice of words you (and your characters) use to convey the scene. Try not to think of these items as disjoint Cartesian bits. (To keep you from thinking of them in that way, I'm going to resist the temptation to break them out into bullet points for separate discussion.) Think in terms of the whole. Think "performance art."

Think "performance art" even if you're writing scenes for a novel.

When one character has to give another character bad news (or any significant piece of information), try doing it symbolically, with a visual. Is your character going to leave the country, only she hasn't told her partner yet? Maybe leave a passport on a desktop or dresser. The klutzy thing to do is have Mary tell Bob directly: "I'm going on a trip." How much better is it to have Bob spot the passport on his own and ask: "What's this?" Klutzy followup: Mary says "I'm going away. This is not working." Better: Mary says "Do we have any sunblock?" (Avoid the straight-on discussion.) Better still: "Can you hand me that plastic bag?" In the plastic bag, clearly visible, is a tube of sunblock. (Props, action, implication, possible symbolism. The sunblock implies Mary is heading for sunnier weather, both literally and metaphorically.)

Is someone getting fired at work? The obvious (and not terribly engaging) way to do it is to have the boss buzz the worker on the phone and say "Can you come in for a minute?" Then there's the office scene where the boss gives the you're-being-laid-off speech.

A far better way to handle it is: Mary comes in to her office and finds the desktop clean, sticky-notes gone, her items in a cardboard box. Someone pokes a head around a corner and says; "The boss wants to see you." Cut to: Joe the Boss, sitting at his desk alone in his quiet office, door closed. Maybe he's just getting off the phone with someone. With zero warning, an office chair comes crashing through the plate glass. Mary, eyes blazing, steps over the rubble. "You wanted to see me?"

Gesticulation is often better than a line of dialog. There's a wonderful scene in The Adjustment Bureau (see my analysis here), where Matt Damon's character (a young politician) flirts with his soon-to-be serious romantic partner (played by Emily Blunt) on a commuter bus. The two had met by chance (and snuck a quick kiss in a men's room) a few days before, never suspecting they'd ever meet up again; but now they've met randomly on a bus. The bus has stopped, she gets off, the bus's door is about to close, and Damon knows he has maybe 3 seconds to say whatever it is he's going to say. As the door starts to close, he blurts out, to the woman he hardly knows: "The morning after I lost the election I woke up thinking about you." She smiles sadly and gives him the finger.

Why is that an effective moment? She doesn't know yet if she should have feelings for the guy (even though they had a quick stolen-kiss moment); she doesn't know if he's telling the truth; and if he is, he's screwing up a sweet and precious, spontaneous, largely non-verbal moment by saying something that implies true love, before they've figured out if they even like each other. He's wrecking a beautiful thing by bringing up love! She should be happy, right? No. She's been there before. She knows you can mess up the most precious part of a budding relationship with heavy "true love" bullshit. She's giving the finger not just to the Matt Damon character but to all the stupid, heavyhanded, bullshit-drama crap that messes up so many delicate, wonderful things in this life.

Emily Blunt's single-finger salute said so many things (so many) that would've utterly failed, in straight dialog.

There's the famous T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park where, before we actually see the T-Rex, before the kids-trapped-in-the-car get to stare up at the beast in Lilliputian awe, we learn how big the creature is from a glass of water. We see concentric waves start to appear in the top of the water, in rhythm to the pounding of the creature's feet (still some distance away, off-camera). In this simple manner, we're told visually how incredibly massive the creature is, long before we actually see it.

The Log Lady.

If you have a crazy-old-lady character, you can show that's she crazy by having her say crazy things, but that's the easy way out. David Lynch did it with a log. Who can forget the Log Lady?

If you need to, just put physical obstacles in a character's way. Instead of your character walking across the room to get to another character, put a chair in between the two, and make him throw the chair out of the way so he can get to the other character.

And by the way, you're not still using plain-Jane verbs like "walk" or "look," are you? Your characters should be striding, tiptoeing, trotting, glancing, staring, glaring, etc., shouldn't they? Choice of vocabulary makes a difference. Some words conjure images and activity; some are lifeless.

One final comment. Every movie has what are called "trailer moments." What are your novel's trailer moments? Every novel should have some. Don't you think?

Figure out what your story's "trailer moments" are. And: See if you can't make some of them play well even with the sound off. If you can work irony and symbolism into the mix, too, so much the better.

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More Thoughts on Visual Storytelling

In yesterday's post, I talked about the need to make fiction more visual (something I call visuality), through the use of props, setting, situation, costume, and action.

Good fiction is vivid. It conjures imagery. The weakest thing you can do is describe a scene through narrative exposition. The second weakest thing you can do is have characters "carry" the action through dialog. Good dialog is more than just characters engaging in smart, "dramatic" conversation. A memorable scene is usually memorable because of what happens visually, not orally.

Lina Wertmüller

Some screenwriters advocate writing a silent-film version of a script first, before adding dialog. For example, before finishing a script, writer-director Lina Wertmüller cuts out every line of speech and tells the whole story with visuals. When the story is sufficiently explainable through action, she adds back only the lines of dialog that are required.

Imagine what this allows you to do. When you've got a good visual story, dialog can go to the next level; you can afford to devote spoken lines to subtext, things that aren't being said, the way things are said, plus foreshadowing, back-references, innuendo, irony—you have so many things to do now, with dialog, besides carry the story.

You can try a thought experiment right now. Think of some of your favorite movies (and maybe some of your least-favorite). Which ones would still be tremendously entertaining to watch with the sound off?

Consider the first of the Star Wars movies—a visual feast from start to finish. We know, even with the sound off, that Darth Vader is the villain. The first time we see him, he's all-black, he's giving orders (and others are carrying them out), and the fact that he's a foot taller than everyone else tells us (visually) that all the Imperial soldiers around him are quite literally underlings. (Plus he of course strangles a coworker early on, which tells us this is one seriously bad dude.) The first time we see Princess Leia, we can see (with the sound off) she's being held under duress. The barroom shootout works even without subtitles. The first time we meet "Ben," he's robed, has a beard—it's pretty obvious he's a wise old man with special knowledge. The entire movie works in silent mode.

The later movies in the Star Wars series (later, as in release date) are dialog-topheavy movies that don't work nearly as well in silent mode as the original film.

The first film in the Alien series would make a very decent silent movie. The later Alien films, not so much.

Jim Carrey has been in a ton of movies. Which ones do you remember most? That's right: the ones that are highly visual. The wordplay in Dumb and Dumber is first-rate, but guess what? The movie is still funny with the sound turned off.

I'm not saying the only good movie is one that can be enjoyed with the sound off. Obviously, movies benefit from having sound. I'm saying most stories can be made better by doing the storytelling in a highly visual way.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give practical tips for boosting the visuality of your novel or screenplay. It turns out there are many ways to pry the lid off this particular can of worms.

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Visuality: How to Make Fiction More Visual

I'm firmly convinced that a solid understanding of the craft of screenwriting can only improve your fiction-writing skills. Many of the skills of good screenwriting, if transferred to novel or short story writing, make for a much-higher-impact story. I'm talking not only about story structure and dialog-related tricks, but verticality and "visuality"—making a story more vivid by making it more visual.

Visuality is something good screnwriters spend a lot of time trying to achieve. Mediocre scripts, and even some "good" scripts (of the "I like it but don't love it" variety), are often mediocre simply because they lack visual impact, relying too much on explicative dialog to move the story along. When you read one of these scripts, you get the feeling you're reading a stage play.

But even stage plays (good ones, that is) rely heavily on visuals, rather than just dialog.

Kenny Hodges in 1977.

Many years ago when I was working for The Mother Earth News, I came to be good friends with somebody at work named Kenny Hodges. Kenny was a great raconteur (I can't begin to replicate his skill here), and one of the many amazing stories he told was the story of the time he auditioned for, and landed, a part in a Broadway play.

The way he tells it, Kenny and some friends decided, on a lark, to get in line for an open reading for a play. Kenny had never done any acting. He had been a musician (the bassist in the 1960s group Spanky and Our Gang). Many people were reading for the part. The role was that of a small-town hoodlum of some kind; the reading involved dialog between the hoodlum and the county sheriff.

The dialog was fairly humdrum, the hoodlum saying to the Sheriff something like "Oh yeah? Well, you may think you're the big shot here, but you ain't got nothing, hear me? I'm the one in charge of this town. Not you."

People read for the part, one by one, and got told "Thank you" by the director (meaning: you're dismissed, have a nice day now).

I couldn't wait for Kenny to reveal the secret of how he got the part, so I interrupted him while he was telling the story and just asked him. He explained that when he got on stage to read the lines, he improvised. At the critical moment, he held out a fist, thumb pointing straight up, and said (completely off book): "See that?"

The actor playing the Sheriff stepped a little closer, looked at Kenny's thumb, and said something like "What? What's that?" Whereupon Kenny flexed his thumb and pointed to the crotch of the thumb, under the first joint, and said: "That's where you are. Right there. Right there, my friend." In essence saying "I've got you under my thumb, asshole."

It got him the part. The director had the thumb gesture written into the script. (Unfortunately, due to a musical engagement, Kenny—who never seriously thought he would get the part in the play—had to decline the role, and never got to act on Broadway.)

This is an example of the power of visuality—and the kind of thing you should be having characters do, if you're writing a script or a novel.

I'm going to continue on this theme in tomorrow's post, because there's a lot more to say about visuality and how to use it to enrich fiction.

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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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8 Rules for Better Dialog

When I was an undergrad at the University of California, Irvine, I was privileged to take a course in playwriting under William Inge, who won an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass and a Pulitzer for Picnic. For ten weeks, ten of us wrote one-act plays, then listened to Inge read from them.

William Inge

Inge had emphysema (he smoked continuously throughout class), wheezing more than talking. He could barely speak. What I most remember him saying, as he looked up from someone's homework assignment, is: "Do real people talk like this?" 

Good dialog is hard. Finding out how bad a piece of written dialog is usually requires nothing more than reading it aloud. (Actors are a help. But in a pinch, you can just stand in front of the mirror.) Still, it's surprising how much bad dialog you can find in novels, stage plays, screenplays—not only amateur-written material but a lot of professionally written stuff as well. For me, bad dialog always stands right out: Wooden characters who speak in complete sentences, never using contractions, never interrupting each other, always spewing bland phrases that reinforce their predictable (and undifferentiated) personalities; characters whose swear words don't even sound right.

I don't claim to be an expert here, but I do believe (based on reading as much awkward, wooden, silly dialog as I've read) there are rules you can follow to keep yourself from writing the Worst Dialog Ever. In that spirit, I present the following eight easy rules for writing better dialog:

1. People use contractions (don't, I'm, you're, etc.) when they speak. Only prigs and ESL students use fully expanded forms.
2. People swear in normal conversation, but not as often as you think.
3. Characters should interrupt each other. Because that's how most conversation is.
4. Write for low syllable count.
5. Use many periods, few commas.
6. Avoid patois unless you're Mark Twain, which you're not.
7. Let subtext (not the actual spoken words) carry the scene, when possible.
8. Don't be boring.

I'm tempted to add one more rule (for screenwriters): Don't insert explicit beats in dialog. Years ago, it was common to insert "(beat)" here or there to control tempo. You'll find opinions divided on whether this is still an acceptable thing to do. My advice? Play it smart and refuse to resort to "(beat)" in your script. Control tempo with sentence length, punctuation (including ellipses where necessary), the (very) occasional wryly, action description, and so forth. Can you imagine Hemingway or Fitzgerald inserting "(beat)" in the middle of a conversation? Think how comical and intrusive it would be if novelists inserted explicit beats in dialog to control tempo. You wouldn't do that in a novel, because it would make for a patently awful reading experience. Why should your screenplay read that way?

The enter-a-scene-late/leave-early rule applies to dialog. We don't need to hear characters greet each other, except maybe at the start of a phone conversation. Likewise we don't need to see/hear them say good-bye, unless the whole scene is about parting.

In one scene of my screenplay Greeners, two characters (principals in an investment firm; a father and a son) are about to discuss the day's dismal results. I can think of a million boring, straightforward ways to begin the discussion. (E.g.: The son says: "My God, what a day," or "How was your day?" or something equally banal.) What I ended up with is this: The father, sitting at his desk, collar loosened, disheveled and dejected, pushes a few papers away. As the son (standing nearby) points a finger at the papers, the old man pulls a bottle of Scotch out of his desk and says: "Don't even ask."

"Don't be boring" is probably the most important rule you can follow. Even when characters have to say ordinary things, try to spice it up. When my main character, Dylan, has to talk to a fast-food drive-up menu box, I could have had him say "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large coffee." Instead, he says: "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large, black, coffee. Black. With extra coffee." A few seconds later, when the cashier recognizes him and starts motor-mouthing (because she's so excited to see him), he answers her over-animated "How are you??" with "Sixty-forty"—and then she goes on talking. The fact that she doesn't stop to ask what "sixty-forty" means is, in itself, a subtextual clue that she's more interested in hearing herself talk than in what he might have to say. Likewise, the fact that he chose to say "sixty-forty" (instead of "so-so" or "can't complain," or something equally vapid) suggests that maybe he already knows she's not going to pay attention to whatever he has to say. Plus, it gives the audience something to chew on. Is he saying things are sixty percent good and forty percent crappy, or the other way around? What, exactly, does he mean by "sixty-forty"?

When you write dialog, consider what I call orthogonality. Two characters, when talking about their conflicting needs/desires, will tend to speak to their own individual concerns more than to the other person's concerns. (Joe wants to talk about the raise he didn't get at work; Mary wants to talk about Joe Junior's bad day at school.) This is what I call orthogonality. You can use it to build realistic-sounding dialog that accentuates (rather than amalgamates) the characters' differences. You've seen this technique used a million times in TV shows and movies. David storms into Tyler's office and says: "Why the hell didn't you tell me we lost the Frankenhammer account?!" Tyler takes a sip of coffee and says: "I'm fine, thanks for asking. How about yourself?" That's orthogonality.

So, to the foregoing list of 8 items, you can add two more:

9. Don't use explicit beats.

10. Exploit orthogonality.

There's more to good dialog than just following these rules. But if you follow them, chances are you'll at least avoid having someone ask you (after reading something you labored over for hours, days, or weeks) "Do real people talk like this?" 

If you'd like to take a look at my WGA-registered screenplay, Greeners, write to me. (Tell me something about yourself.) My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas.

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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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