1. There is always one character too many.
Changing a character’s gender or ethnicity can often unlock a story. More often, eliminating a character is the answer, and better to do it now and save everybody else a lot of work.
- Every movie contains its own review.
“This is terrible.” “I don’t believe this.” “Why are we here?” Lines like this should be avoided, lest they cue the answer: “Yes, it is.” “Neither do I.” “Good question, let’s leave.”
- Duplications.
In Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40,” both Albert Brooks and John Lithgow play men who’ve married young women and had children late in life. It’s a minor flaw in a movie with many flaws and much genius, but duplications like are often a sign that an obsession hasn’t been fully worked through, especially if the screenwriter has failed to hang a lantern on the situation—have the characters themselves note the coincidence.
- “I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.”
Actors want to have somewhere to go with their performance. But not every character needs to grow and change, unless it’s an old Lifetime project. Steve McQueen, the author of the above quote, knew people came to see Steve McQueen.
- Invisible Martians.
Jorge Luis Borges observed that H.G. Wells wrote one novella about Martians attacking the Earth, and another novella about an Invisible Man. What he didn’t write was a novella about Invisible Martians attacking the Earth. (He also didn’t write “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”)
- Premise-fighters.
In Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Sissy Spacek, playing Kevin Costner’s wife, accuses him of caring more about John Kennedy’s assassination than he does about his own family. Yes, and so does the audience.
When the protagonist is the premise-fighter, the situation is even more annoying. Once “Manhattan Murder Mystery” gets down to business it’s amusing, but Woody Allen wastes a lot of screen time telling Diane Keaton she’s crazy for suspecting their neighbor has killed his wife.
- Naming names.
The screenwriter knows the characters’ names. So does the director, and the actors. The audience doesn’t. All too often, characters will talk about “Bill” or “Emily” or “Jimarcus,” and the people watching the movie have to guess who’s being referred to. (Sometimes, owing to cuts in the editing room, the character’s name has never been spoken.)
Same goes for dates and times. We’ll be informed that something happened “a month ago” or “last week” or “this morning,” and our own sense of how much time has elapsed is totally different. Movies create their own sense of time, and screenwriters get specific at their peril, often cramming several scenes into one “longest day,” when they could easily have been spaced over a week or more.
- Auteur, auteur?
Screenwriters often complain that directors get credit for things that are spelled out in the script. In the old Z Channel magazine, F.X. Feeney described a sequence in “The Sender” as “one of the most bizarre scenes in movie history,” and gave sole credit to the director. When I told him the director had pretty much shot what I’d written, he apologized—but with a shrug. There’s nothing to be done about this.
- Scenus interruptus.
Quentin Tarantino got started writing scenes for himself to act in acting class, and in addition to his other gifts, he’s a born playwright. His long scenes—the bar scene in “Inglourious Basterds,” the dinner table scene in “Django Unchained”—are masterpieces of discursive tension, and a far better model for today’s screenwriters than the old-school laconic style perfected by Robert Towne.
And in too many movies and TV shows, the scene stops just as it’s getting underway, leaving the viewer to wonder, “What did she say to that?” “Downton Abbey” was a typical offender—to keep a bunch of stories going, it tended to skimp on each scene.
- “The gloom of the first draft.”
When I was starting out, as a novelist, I used to have a good day followed by a bad day, and fell into the trap of thinking that if only I could solve some writing problem that was plaguing me, my anxiety, depression, or bad temper would evaporate at least for a while. Maybe it was all those years of psychoanalysis, but I no longer funnel my neuroses through my writing; now writing is my heroin, and I’m easier to live with. I used to console myself with the knowledge that Norman Mailer suffered gloom in the early stages of a project–“Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang tells Michel Piccoli in “Contempt”—but I’m relieved to say I no longer suffer. When inspiration fails, I go on to the next, the way you were told to leave a tricky SAT question and go back to it later. Or check my email. Writing, like acting, ought to be enjoyable. And not a substitute for figuring out what’s really bothering you.