I suck at writing montages - please help

C

c.g._eads

Veteran
Whenever I get to a montage, I hate it. I feel like it breaks up the rhythm of the script and I never know quite how to approach it. I only use it if I absolutely have to. Is there a strategy on how to approach these things?
 
INT. SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- DAY

MUSICAL MONTAGE BEGINS

Leatherface dances behind the carcass of a cow.

EXT. DRY FIELD -- DAY

He runs through a field.

(...)

INT./EXT. DEBBIE'S CAR -- NIGHT

They kiss passionately, she begins to undress him.

END MUSICAL MONTAGE
 
Yeah, exactly! That's what I do. But it always feel disjointed to me. I guess I'm not explaining myself correctly. I want to know how to *approach* these scenes. Montages are one of those things that work so magnificently onscreen, and yet are so boring on paper. So I try and avoid them like the plague. Yet sometimes I have to write them to show the passage of time. I mean, do you guys just put random images together. Do you try to tell little stories in your montages? Has anyone read anything on when, how, why, and what to do in a montage?
 
Yeah I have trouble with them too. I hate them, but they always seem like the best solution for those scenes like in ROCKY where the hero is doing some kind of training or preparation to reach his goal. They just don't seem to read well and feel like a cop out.
 
Hm, interesting. I think that montages almost never work well on screen. I usually can't stand them. They tend to be a cheap, uncreative way to advance the story. A well written scene that encapsulates the progression in time is usually more interesting to me. But at least make the montage actually ADVANCE the story, rather than just show differing images of the same story beat. For example, they fall in love so we see them walking on the beach, rolling in bed, feeding each other breakfast...these images don't advance the story, because they're all just repeating the same story beat of "falling in love". But a montage that shows a young man growing up to be a gang leader, might show the first killing he witnesses, the jail time hespends as a teen, the hard work in a factory in his 20s and the first time he pulls the trigger on the gun himself. There's some evolution and more than one story beat encapsulated in the montage images.

The South Park example of a montage linked by dasher above is an example of a bad montage in that it's a funny parody of bad montages, and only worth emulating when trying to poke fun at the device. I think it just underlines how cheesy montages really are.
 
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What a montage is doing is showing the passage of time (because you have to do this in a script or else it becomes a static, timeless mess), AND doing some character development.

Who care if it doesn't look good on paper -- it's how it looks on the screen that counts.
 
Sean, I think we're thinking of different montages. Sure, if you take a montage from "Friends" showing Ross and Rachel falling in love in Vegas, that's cheesy. But take any of the dozen or so montages from Terrance Malick's The Thin Red Line and you're talking about epic storytelling. A piece of music over interesting visuals is one of the most powerful things you can do in movies, I think.
 
pmark23 said:
What a montage is doing is showing the passage of time.
Click to expand...

This is how I view them. They work better than a graphic saying "six months later" or a one the nose scene like

MASTER WU
You've studied Monkey Kung Fu for five months
now. Your Kung Fu is very good. You are ready to
fight Ratboy.

LOBO
I just wanna go the distance...



Here's some artsy stuff on montages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory
 
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I agree - I hate writing them too. But I think, especially in comedies, they're almost always necessary.

What looks worse to me is the (supposed) preferred way of writing them:

SERIES OF SHOTS:

1) Main character doing something

2) Secondary character doing something to main character

3) etc.

I'll be damned if I put numbers in my screenplay! I just use dashes... makes it feel slightly more natural.
 
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