Goodfellas script question

A

Angelshare1

Well-known member
In a story you have your character on a mission to achieve something. In the first quarter or so you're supposed to get to the part where they need to blow up the death star, or find the Holy Grail, or rescue the princess. It seems like Goodfellas doesn't really have that. It's just about a couple of guys in the mafia over a few decades.

I'm writing a fictional book involving the mafia and I'm finding a problem. I don't really have a specific plan or mission that my characters are on other than make lots of money. I thought about Goodfellas and realized they don't really have something specific either. Yet the story works. All my little writing books about plot and story say I need to come up with a princess to rescue but I really like my Goodfellas style plot.

Any other movies have similar stories without a clear goal? I read John Truby's book on screenwriting and I never realized what the plot of The Godfather is. It's about a son seeking revenge on those who tried to assassinate his father. Never realized that was the actual plot since it takes place over a decade or so. We have the wedding, the horse scene and then we jump into the plot starting with them wanting to get into narcotics which drives the rest of the movie. I never really noticed that before. It seems like it's a just a movie that observes a mafia family for a decade or so.

I thought about bio-pics but they usually give the subject a huge personal burden to overcome such as Walk the Line or Ray.

Any advise on writing a book where it's just "about" some guys in the mob?
 
Goodfellas is a five act tragedy. Classic rise and fall structure. Scarface is another similar story in that structure. Breaking Bad. Crime stories often use this structure, because the common theme is that crime doesn't pay. Henry Hill is on a mission to be 'somebody'. He idolized the gangsters in his neighborhood, and that was his goal, to join their life of crime and get rich and be a big shot. His obstacles to fulfilling his goal are his parents, that he's not Italian, other mobsters, his marriage, and the law. We follow his rise through the criminal organization, and eventually, the law catches up to him, which starts his fall. The tragedy is that he loses everything and becomes a nobody. Here's more information on the 5 act structure--

https://www.storyboardthat.com/articles/e/five-act-structure

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/20/16910760/breaking-bad-10th-anniversary-birthday-structure

https://www.writersstore.com/hell-is-other-people-a-look-back-at-goodfellas/
 
Most of Scorsese’s films star antihero’s who don’t learn their lessons. That’s what flips those films on their heads and makes them fascinating. They are amoral and the only ones who learn are us. They also become a reflection on society because so many don’t learn. Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street, Raging Bull, even The King of Comedy. These people learn nothing.

The Godfather is different. It’s also just a few years. It’s about the loss of one’s soul, which is what happens to Michael. Don’t worry about plot so much (knight rescues princess, etc.). Think about character growth. Man learns to trust again. Child forgives parent. Person believes in love again. Person finds faith. Figure out whatever it is you really want to be the growth of the person and then use plot to make it happen. Otherwise it’s just stuff for 100 minutes without consequence.
 
Mitch, I just gotta say I love your posts here and at CML. You've always got something good to say. In a world where product managers from other companies can't even be bothered to respond to direct questions or engage in conversations about their own products, I think it is great that you truly enjoy this business, have a passion for it, and are willing to put your opinions and advice out there on the line. I just wanted to let you know it is appreciated and wish there were more people like you.
 
Watch movies. Many different movies. You'll notice something - there are many very good movies, but not just *one* plot device and they can all have different structures. You can analyze a given movie and see a device like "rescue princess" or "hero's journey" or whatnot... and so what? If everyone was bent on just following one design, you'd only have one kind of movie. And yet there are many movies with wildly different structures. The moral of the story is: there is no one structure/device, no "one weird trick" to all movies. And it's a mistake to try to fit your story to an arbitrary design - because more likely than not, your story will suffer, don't be Procrustes to your stories, they'll scream and bleed and die. Go where the story leads you - if it is an involving story, it'll hold the audience's attention and that's all that matters. Here is the prescription:

1) Watch a ton of different movies. Learn from them, and in particular learn that as long as the story is involving, the design simply does not matter.

2) Ask yourself, and keep asking yourself - "Is my story involving for the audience?" If your story is involving, then that's all you need, whatever the structure.

That's it!
 
I'm not against watching lots of movies to observe different ways to tell a story, but I would say that there is value to learning about story structure, especially classical 3-act and 5-act formats. If you understand the "rules" then you can know when it's ok to break them. A lot of the rules are there for a good reason, like set up the essential character conflict in the first ten minutes. That's good because it keeps your audience from being bored.

Here's a favorite example: Warren Beatty's "Reds". It's the early 1900s and Diane Keaton is a reporter who arrives late to a Socialist Party meeting. She opens a door to see a ballroom packed with lots of big wigs pontificating on the New World Order. One Party official blabbers about why the government crushes the workers and so on, and asks John Reed (Beatty) to please explain his theory as to why those in power do x, y, z in a long-winded and nuanced question. Beatty stands up, looks around and sheepishly say "For the money" and sits back down. BOOM -- we know that he's an iconoclast who cannot and will not ever do anything but speak his true mind. He will always be at odds with the politicians who will run the party and the Revolution. And Keaton is instantly fascinated by him while he remains somewhat aloof. The nature of the main characters and their interconnections have been lain down in the very first scene, and we're less than ten minutes into a three hour movie.

Your audience is almost always more intelligent than you think. If they are not getting it than you are not telling it right. The last thing you want to do is bore them or have them way ahead of you in your storytelling. The lesson of Reds is that the most important thing to establish is the characters and their essential natures. This will inform everything they do and how they will address any given situation. Actors may call it backstory and motivation, but it's all the same thing.

After you know the characters you need to know the essential conflict. What is the idea that you want to tell, the situation you want to stick them into? The plot bits are secondary and will evolve based on knowing who the characters are and the situation you insert them into. An alien is left behind on earth and a boy who's missing a father figure and needs to grow into his own manhood finds the alien. This is 90% of the job. Figure these two things out first and then start telling your tale.

Here's a nice storytelling device that Peter Weir used in all his films. You should be able to take the main characters and illustrate their essential trait and conflict in a single moment or even better a single shot. That shot should set up what is the overarching story idea of the movie and if you really do it right there needs to be no dialog. Some Peter Weir examples: In "Witness," a little boy is in the police station with detective Harrison Ford, looking at mug shots to try to identify the perpetrator of a murder he witnessed. The boy wanders off in the room and finds a glass cabinet housing various awards for the precinct's officers. Ford sees and walks over. The boy points to a photo of detective Danny Glover, and Harrison Ford covers the boy's hand so no one else sees because he realizes that they are in the middle of a police station full of corrupt murdering cops, the belly of the beast. In The Truman Show," the main character is beginning to suspect that the world around him is not what it appears to be, and that everyone is pretending for his benefit. Breaking his routine, he chooses to enter a different building than usual and catches people standing around instead of leading their lives. He moves to leave the building and enters its glass revolving door. Cut to a shot with the camera inside the turnstile with him looking through a layer of glass. Truman is trapped inside a glass bubble, unable to connect to the rest of the world that he sees around him. He does two full rotations in the turnstile and he knows that he's not going anywhere, just in circles. The camera is in the bubble with him, always watching what he does but never connecting to him.

These two scenes really tell you what the essential motivation of their movies are. They could be turned into the 5-second elevator pitch lines that you use to sell your story. If you don't know what this pitch line would be for your movie, stop what you're doing and figure it out because this comes first. If you don't know what the equivalent scene would be in your movie, stop what you're doing and write it. You may decide it's too on the nose and cut it, but it's the moment that tells you what the movie is about, why you are telling it, and why the audience should want to watch. Everything else is just stuff that happens.
 
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The thing about "story structure" type rules, is that there is always the danger that the movie becomes formulaic, when everybody thinks that they need to "follow the rules" - it's how you get assembly line vehicles that are functional but uninspired. Focusing on such structure rules becomes a shortcut to artistic expression. In reality, there are no substitutions for an artist's judgment and story-telling skill without reference to *anything* other than how to continue to involve an audience - that way the results are far more organic and fresh. In contrast, an artist can function perfectly well, including the highest level without a lick of "theory". There is value in examining story structure, especially for a critic, academic or scholar of a medium, but it's a truism to say that an artist often uses intuition when creating, and may not be able to articulate grand theoretical justifications, whereas the scholar often is a master of theory but cannot generate fresh art. That is why I think it is important to emphasize to aspiring artists the importance of the prime directive: involve your audience! Instead, screenwriters often get lost in multiple books and courses and reading "how to" manuals which don't amount to a hill of beans if you have no artistic ability. Pay attention to your gut. Watch movies to see the possibilities the medium offers and expand your horizons of what can be done, but focus on the involving the audience and don't worry about theory, especially that trends in theory change with time (and that's how you get "character arc" era, then - as these days - it becomes "it's arcy!" as criticism, which is a recent reaction to formulaic "character arc" stories"). People get tired of formula, no matter how good. So abandon it, because it changes with time anyway and you're in danger of dating your project. Instead, it's always about the prime directive: involve your audience by any means necessary.
 
I get your point, but honestly if someone has no artistic ability then learning story structure isn't going to slow them down. Knowing the rules means knowing how & why to break them. A rule is only there because there is a value to it, like if you don't give a character motivation then that person becomes uninteresting, or if you don't follow the 180 degree rule it can become confusing where people are and the direction they're facing. But if you know these things and understand them you also know when to ignore them and how to grow beyond them. Picasso used to occasionally paint a fairly classical work with realistic dimensions just to show he could, then go back to Cubism or other abstract forms. A rule is really a helpful suggestion, like having a beginning, middle and end. That one's been subverted for generations, where Godard famously stated, "Yes, just not necessarily in that order." Tarantino certainly likes to play with that but he knows the "rules" and knows exactly why he's doing it. Even a fairly traditional storyteller like Robert Zemekis says that he likes to cut also all of the beginning, dive right into the middle and then wrap it up as soon as he touches on the end.

If you want to subvert the rules you can go back to Citizen Kane. Just what genre is it? What part is the beginning, the middle, or the end? There are plenty of rules tossed out the window in that film, and even though it was his first Welles had been working in the theater and on radio for years (and subverting the forms there as well). But you can only really do that if you understand the norms first. What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Remember that Hamlet is three hours of indecision, culminating in a sword fight. Shakespeare kinda knew what he was doing and what he chose not to do.
 
Right. I try to make my comments helpful, and it seems to me we are at a point where most people have been told countless times to "study structure" etc., there are literally thousands of books on screenwriting/directing etc., countless courses and so on. I figure there is little value in my piling on - that would be comment #infinity# - who needs that. Instead, in order to bring value to my comment, I would like to point out something that is spoken of much more rarely - the danger of strapping people into "rules" and missing the big picture. Every model of how a piece of art works is just that - a model, and by definition incomplete. A model is always a simplification of what it attempts to describe in limited ways. For every rule there are countless exceptions, and adopting a system of rules is like putting on glasses - they can let you see something through a their lenses, but there is always distortion, and a danger that you become trapped in the limitations. You stop just "seeing". Instead, you see it through the prism of your theories. It blinds and blinkers as often as makes things clear. Rather than tell someone about how a character needs motivation, I rather ask "what fits this picture, what makes this involving, what do I respond to viscerally" - the less I worry about rules the more likely I'll come up with something like "My Dinner With Andre" where a whole shedload of "rules" are irrelevant. And since you brought up famous painters, I like the saying "so you learned all the rules? Now forget them!". Take off your preconceptions/rules/paradigms/glasses and LOOK. I always ask "how does it make me feel", "what do I hear?", "what do I see?" - and it's never steered me wrong. As Ray Charles said to the young engineer who told him about all the amazing new mixer with a 100 tracks on which they are mixing his take - "I don't care how many tracks it has baby, how does it sound?". Same here - I don't care about the "rules" (often more temporary than supposedly universal) - how does it look? It's the same with everything - you see folks discussing camera/mic/light spec sheets endlessly instead of asking simple questions: how does it look/sound to you? Forget the spec sheets, and use your eyes, your ears and your judgment.

Anyhow, there's a flood of recommendations - everyone and their dog - for folks to watch all the "rules". I'm as small voice for using your senses and your judgment and not relying on "rules" from supposed authorities. If something looks good to me, I'll use that, never mind if it contradicts some rule someone decided to posit. I have only one principle - involve your audience, that's all you need, and if what you do is boring, it won't be any less boring because it adhered to the "rules", if the cam won't do good footage I don't care about the specs and so on. Only YOU can decide, there is no abdicating your judgment in favor of rules, you bear the ultimate responsibility. Vive la difference!
 
Dan Harmon has a story structure he uses, and has put useful tutorials online, but he makes that point that following his structure won't necessarily make your story good, only that it will be in a shape that will make the audience's brain go "mmm"..."yummy". Just like the human body is primed to like sugar and fat, it also has a preference for certain story shapes. The best chefs at any five star restaurant still throw a stick of butter into most of what they make. Structure isn't "rules", it's a container for a story and how well you fill that container is what makes the difference. And there is more than one useful structure.
 
My point is to understand what’s behind the rules, not to necessarily follow them. Very few of us are autodidactic. If you know your WHY then you can use it to decide your HOW.

I believe in discipline. A great craftsperson is someone who has had a lot of training and practice. Robert Towne didn’t write Chinatown on instinct. Paddy Chayefsky wasn’t winging it when he wrote Marty or Network. Beckett and Pinter knew exactly what they were doing as they broke every rule, and those rule breaks were often the point. Even an “entertainment” like Mad Max: Fury Road is intricately conceived with precision care and consideration.
 
Mitch Gross said:
My point is to understand what’s behind the rules, not to necessarily follow them. Very few of us are autodidactic. If you know your WHY then you can use it to decide your HOW.

I believe in discipline. A great craftsperson is someone who has had a lot of training and practice. Robert Towne didn’t write Chinatown on instinct. Paddy Chayefsky wasn’t winging it when he wrote Marty or Network. Beckett and Pinter knew exactly what they were doing as they broke every rule, and those rule breaks were often the point. Even an “entertainment” like Mad Max: Fury Road is intricately conceived with precision care and consideration.
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Exactly this. I compare it to classical music structure. Mozart and Beethoven both had music theory drummed into them as kids by their fathers, sometimes at the end of a cane. Later, when they were young adults they learned sonata form from the man who invented it, Josef Haydn, who was teacher to both. Sonata form was a prescriptive formula, defining how and when a piece of music should modulate and imposing a rigid key structure on it.

It's a widespread and appealing fallacy to think that following a set of arbitrary rules produces formulaic art. Mozart's great piano concertos and all over Beethoven's symphonies demonstrate the precise opposite; that structural discipline frees and empowers the great artist. Famously, the horns announce the recapitulation of the first movement of the Eroica symphony in the "wrong" key. Beethoven was so incensed by the criticisms, he wrote a long, angry rebuttal to prove that he really was following the "rules" (he was using two keys at once, the horns in the tonic and the strings in the dominant seventh).

I see very strong comparisons between what Robert McKee, for example, espouses in dramatic form and what Haydn imposed on music in the late eighteenth century. The human aesthetic wants naturally to find structure in a chaotic world and there are certain things we naturally find pleasing and that speaks to our emotions in all of the different art forms. Codifying these "rules" is a valuable way of helping the artist to understand this aesthetic, whether they choose to follow them or not.
 
This is why I like dvxuser - intelligent debate, people of wide experience and a genuine desire to learn. I really appreciate being able to exchange views with such fantastic folks. So, continuing our exchange of points of view - I'd like to observe that the best guide to life remains life, not a theory of "how to live", same as watching films, reading novels, looking at paintings, listening to music is superior to "theory". Therefore, let's look at how artists actually created and perhaps such "life evidence" will tell us best what works and how.

Yep, an artist may start out "learning theory", or "at school" (painting academy, conservatory, film school, mfa programs etc.). In fact, that's the best way to work in an established art form - and it makes sense: if you want to paint like the old masters, or write classical music forms, etc., the best way to learn is often by such study. But it's not the only way to create art in general, especially for newer or rapidly evolving art forms - for that, frequently you want to go against the grain. And no, not just by first learning the old and then creating the new. It can also be by bypassing the old altogether, and not being shackled by old theory.

There have been many great jazz, rock, pop, hip-hop artists - all musical art forms that were/are new or rapidly evolving - who never went to the conservatory or any musical school, and who created and innovated at the highest levels. Sometimes they didn't even consider themselves musicians at all - Brian Eno, one of the most innovative and brilliant composers and producers is a great example. Or trained in one art form but transitioned into a different one - art school to music for example, sometimes slightly more related - theater to film. Sometimes these people learned in their bedrooms or in the streets, sometimes they were barely literate. No, you don't need to "study theory" or go to special schools. In fact, it can hurt you - or as Andy Warhol said "sometimes staying in school too long can hurt you" - he put his finger on something very important. You can study "theory", but you don't have to. You do need to create, and observe and learn. The best way to learn is to experience the art form you want to be active in: watch films, read novels, look at paintings, listen to music - that's all you really need.

Mitch brought up Orson Wells, but that's a bit counter to the "theory" theory. Yes, he had a theatrical background, but let's not kid ourselves, there is a world of difference between the two - film really has such a huge dimension beyond the dramatic stage, and yet, somehow Wells, made a masterpiece on his first outing... perhaps precisely because he was not wedded to long established working theories in film. HIS FIRST FILM. It tells you that you don't always need long "experience" in a given medium or any experience (his FIRST film - ZERO personal exprience of making films) - he didn't make "many films" before his masterpiece, a film that for a long time topped "the greatest films" lists. In fact, his subsequent films - as he was "gaining experience", never matched that breakthrough. Mitch also brought up Tarantino - but again, it's counter to the "theory" theory. QT not only never went to film school (as indeed many great directors never did), he has little formal education - he learned how? BY WATCHING TONS OF FILMS and writing himself, not reading "how to" books. I personally rate his first completed feature film "Reservoir Dogs" the highest, and am dubious about what "more experience" added to his oeuvre. I highly recommend that - look at the art form, that's the key, and often it can be BETTER to see it without preconceived, predigested overlay of "theory" which only distorts your perception like a distorting lens - how often artists have complained that they had to "unlearn" all the bad theory drummed into them. Because as I said before - theory, a theoretical model can NEVER perfectly describe reality, otherwise it is reality - it must necessarily simplify. And when you simplify, little details - or big honking continents - can slip by unnoticed. "Theory" can help, but it can also hurt. LIVE THE ARTFORM in its totality, with fresh eyes, without preconceptions - that's your most important teacher. And always remember - "theory" is often presented as some kind of law of nature, when in reality it is subject to fashion of the times, and real breakthroughs happen when you directly contradict the supposed "laws" - for every law you care to name, I can cite you great films that broke it. Don't get too attached to theory - use you own eyes and ears and your judgment, and trust your gut. Then go and do it.

Young artists are most often the breakthrough artists - music, painting, whatnot. When they often have the least "experience" and are least infected by someones idea of "theory". "I did it, because I didn't know I couldn't". Because people will tell you endlessly how it's "supposed to be done", and how you can't do this or that. "Can't" is a big favorite. Why "can't"? Because "rules" and "theory". Bollocks. Trust your gut. Use your eyes/ears, judgment. Or as the old joke about a politician talking to a voter: "whom are you going to believe - me, or your lying eyes?". Never take anyone's word for anything (me included). Forge your own path, and don't worry overmuch by what's "expected". Breakthroughs are more often done by young "inexperienced" artists than 50 or 60 year old artists with "decades of experience".

The proof is in the pudding. Eat it, taste it, don't read about how it tastes. Ponder this: the academic, the scholar, the brilliant theoretician researcher will be much better at describing art and generating theories and academic papers by critics than the working artist. Highly significant, isn't it. The greatest guys at "theory" are not generating art. Meanhwile there are plenty of examples of artists who couldn't tell you a single thing about "theory", they do something "because it feels right". Tells you exactly which comes first - which you should have already known. You don't need theory to generate art. You do need art to generate theory. Of course ART comes first and theory that describes it can only follow. That tells you all you need to know. Generate art, and the theoretician will follow, often revising his "theory" as to what is possible, often in contradiction to his old theory. If theory was so great at generating art, the greatest artists would all be coming from the ranks of academic critics.

Again, there is value in theory, as there is value in criticism and value in long experience. I'm just saying it isn't necessary in the sense of being foundational. You can do without. It can help. It can also hurt. There are no "rules" - and as we know from Goldman "nobody knows anything" is just a sharp way of saying something is a "rule" only until it isn't and there is no authority you can delegate the responsibility for choice - you, your judgment, your abilities, you alone are responsible. The sooner you assume that responsibility, the sooner you'll generate something worthwhile.

My personal advice:

1) Live the artform directly - in this case, watch movies. And watch some more. Don't just read about it. Write, don't just read about writing. Better read the work than about the work.

2) Go do it. Is it involving for the audience? If yes, don't worry about whether someone says it breaks some rule or another. If the rule was broken, it just means the "theory" will have to catch up... for the millionth time, since the beginning of the history of art.

By the way, I'm not "dissing out of ignorance" - I've read the mentioned McKee, and Syd Field's book and a ton of others, I've taken my courses and so on. It's just that after all that, I came to my own conclusions. And my conclusion is that there is plenty of advice to "study theory" and not enough pushback to use your own senses, and trust your own ARTISTIC JUDGMENT. I've seen what works and what doesn't. It is my own take, and it may be different from yours, but again, vive la difference! Just a little counter to nudge the old neurons to do a little thinking :)
 
First off, most of us are not Orson Welles. That said, he had a huge amount of experience coming into Citizen Kane and was clearly a fast learner. He had already done the brown shirt version of Julius Caesar on Broadway and of course War of the Worlds on radio, plus, many other works at a young age. And clearly he is the exception to the rule.

Tarantino did watch a lot of movies at the video store where he worked. He also read books about movie and — hey guess what? — film theory and writing. And also, most of us aren’t Quentin Tarantino.

I’m not sure what people think happens in film theory and writing classes, but my experience is that people watch a lot of movies and then they discuss them to figure out what does and doesn’t work for them. No one just hands out a bunch of rules and shows you the door.

On one hand you say that the most refreshing voices are those that have not been trapped by the dogma of the old, and there is some legitimacy to that. It’s the Laurie Anderson “Language is a Virus” theorem. But on the other hand you suggest that people watch a lot of movies to learn, which to me is like saying go to film school but only kinda. These things appear in opposition to me.

Learn rules but take them as suggestion. Learn what’s possible so that you have a framework for what you find preferable. Frankly every good artist will say that restrictions breed creativity and when there are no rules it becomes difficult to start or finish.
 
I studied with a world class acting teacher. He always repeated two things that pertain to this conversation.
"You learn the rules, so you can forget about them."
"Use some of it, all of it, or none of it."
 
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OldCorpse brings up a fine point in that the people who write books about art are usually not artists, at least not ones you or I have ever heard of. So, what if the critics' description of art is wrong, or at best an inaccurate outline, like a photocopy of a photocopy?

As someone who has been accused of being creative, I can speak from my own perspective. I find my work following the old rules despite my ignorance. For example, in a book I wrote in fifth grade, there is: the inciting incident, quite literally a wizard, the trip into enemy territory, rising conflict, the showdown between hero and villain, and denouement. By that age I may have seen the dramatic arc on a page in a book, but I can tell you I wasn't mainly thinking about it as I wrote. I was writing whatever I thought would be awesome or funny or entertaining, first to myself, and then to the reader.

There are many books aimed at hopeful screenwriters, but from my understanding (I still need to read it for myself) Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist who sought merely to describe what he observed happening in artists of all times and places throughout history, 99% of whom did not have access to Syd Field's Screenplay, yet there it is, the same emergent structure time and again (roughly). So you have to conclude that the structure is intrinsic to human psychology. Time and again these people from across the world, groping in the dark, keep coming up with a similar structure.

Still, going back, I agree with OldCorpse that the surest sign of a hack is someone who begins with the formula, with no story in mind, and coldly adds events in order to fulfill the formula. Furthermore I think he and I would agree that we really don't want the artist to consider popularity or wealth when making story decisions. On the other hand, I would say, if other artists are anything like me, they still think about the audience and the effect a given scene will have, whether it will be effective. It's a strange contradiction.

I've zigzagged between two points of view, but let me bring it around to some sort of application:

- If you don't have a story that seems to be springing out from your heart, however vague, don't write the screenplay. Go do something else, at least for now. The world doesn't need any more stories written only for wealth.

- When you're in the weeds writing your story, chances are you're going to get stuck. That is when maybe the rules and outlines by the critics and anthropologists can be useful, but as a diagnostic tool and a hint, not necessarily as an edict.

- Don't be afraid to make a story decision that seems to break the rules. This isn't because the rules are useless but because the critics' understanding of the rules is limited, and your understanding of the critics' understanding is even more limited. It's not that structure is wrong, it's that your idea that feels right may have an underlying structure that you don't recognize, that might become apparent to you or to some critic later on. Or it may be junk. Such is life. If you're not putting yourself out there, you're not likely to do anything great. Good luck!
 
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This is starting to get weird. If you're watching films to study them, rather than just as entertainment or enlightenment, you're studying form and techique. You're just not getting it out of a book about screenplay writing. And, correct me if I'm wrong because it's been about 25 years since I read Syd Field's book, but doesn't he state at the top that he derived it from the great films?
 
Yeah, all the "rules" are is a codifying of traditions.

In many ways I agree that we're all saying versions of the same thing. This is really about how you enter into the process of telling the story.

In my view, it's first figure out what is the THING you want to say. Why do you want to tell this story? What's the point? Then that becomes the thing that your main character learns or does. So you then need to create a history to that person to put them into that mental state, and then you need to create a situation in which the person is faced with this issue and overcomes it somehow.

There's a wonderful film from 1980 called The Stunt Man. Filmmaker Richard Rush said that after Vietnam, Watergate and other events, he found that people couldn't trust anymore. He decided he wanted to make a movie about someone who had lost the ability to trust, and then learn to trust again. To do that he created a character who was a Vietnam vet who was screwed over when he returned home. And to place him in a situation where he was forced to trust others but found that everything around him was a lie? He's a wanted man and stumbles his way onto a movie set, the definition of fallacy. And then the whole movie becomes about the director (a fantastic Peter O'Toole, BTW) trying to get him to trust again. It's a brilliant bit of metaphor, but the story didn't start with let's shoot some cool stunts around the Hotel Coronado and give Peter O'Toole some scenery to chew. It started with the idea of someone learning to trust again. That's storytelling.
 
Ain't dvxuser grand?! So many smart folks on here - and I've always loved Mitch's posts. We may agree or not, but it's always interesting. In this case, I can only applaud combatenthropy's points - we certainly think alike. I'm more than happy to further explore this fascinating subject! What Mitch says encasulates many of the points in just a few short sentences - and so it bears analyzing for greater illumination of contrasts:

That said, he had a huge amount of experience coming into Citizen Kane and was clearly a fast learner.

That's very amusing, but now let's get real. He had a huge amount of experience in what? Film? Err, that would be a "no".

He had already done the brown shirt version of Julius Caesar on Broadway and of course War of the Worlds on radio, plus, many other works at a young age.

Heh, that's a neat trick. Film is its own medium. Yes, you can learn some aspects of filmmaking from stage work or radio work, especially about drama - but it is tangential and most certainly nobody of a sound mind would imagine that you are in any way "hugely experienced" in film if you haven't as much as shot a short, let alone made a single film. C'mon. And even such experiences which are related, need to be modified for film - like acting: in theater you play to the last row, for one, and film demands a very different approach, which is why early cinema where actors came from theater seemed much more artificial and actors had to developp film acting skills, same for staging, lighting, and drama what with the toolset of film (especially editing - which is what the whole revolution of early filmmaking was with Eisenstein, tools which needed to be invented because they did not exist in theater). Sorry, but while related, it is not in any way "experienced in film", just as being a great painter with zero work in sculpture would allow you to directly translate that experience from 2D to 3D of sculpting with a radically different skill set requirement. I'm sure one could find an even more tangential connection to film if you are a great baker of cookies, but it really is not terribly relevant. Anyone care to opine about how anyone would greet an assertion from someone who never even shot a short as being "hugely experienced" because they did theater? A bit of reality, please.

Oh, and btw. let's say he had a "good amount" of experience in theater, not "huge" - when it comes to experience you can have decades of experience, which he clearly did not, being only 25 when he (1) directed (2) co-wrote (3) starred in and (4) produced Citizen Kane. Say "I'm 25 and have a HUGE amount of experience in theater" - and listen to people laugh. He was 11 before he even enrolled in a school that had anything to do with theater. By 25, generously, he had 14 years of theater experience - that's a good amount, no doubt, but not HUGE compared to those who spend decades in theater.

But Mitch said something very important:

First off, most of us are not Orson Welles.

Indeed. And why not? What was different about Orson Wells was not the amount of experience he had compared to other filmmakers - indeed he had zero filmmaking experience, it was not his mastery of the "rules of filmmaking". It was his ARTISTIC JUDGMENT - in fact, it was his approach of disregard of what came before - we know this, because he exhibited these characteristics even in his theater work, where his production were noted for many "firsts", rules broken and conventions subverted. And he did the same subversion in film - and NO he had no deep knowledge of film and its rules, he had zero creative experience with the medium. What he had in abundance, was an artistic judgment and imperviousness to supposed "rules" (in film, lack of even awareness - which was richly documented all along the process, where he was famously unfamiliar with and indifferent to hollywood rules as he produced Citizen Kane, much to the consternation of studio executives). Most of us are not Orson Welles to our detriment. We need fewer rule learning lectures and more honing of artistic judgment and exercise of our own senses - that was Orson Wells. And to put a nail in that coffin see next:

And clearly he is the exception to the rule.

Aha! Whenever you see the word "exception" it is a signal that it is time to revise the theory, because there is a FLAW. You don't try to fit reality to the theory. When reality differs, don't try to force fit it to the theory - instead, revise the theory. That's how we got from Newton's beautiful theory to Einstein's and from Einstein to whatever will be next. The Ptolemaic model, with the Earth as center and the Sun orbiting, worked well for simple observation. When something didn't fit, a workaround was found, the "exception" subsumed under more complicated circles within circles, epicycles and so on, long and complicated, all to accomodate reality to the theory. By the end it was an enormously complicated system with patch upon a patch upon a patch all trying to wrestle reality into the Procrustean bed of theory. And then, someone came along and said, let's use the "exceptions" to revise the whole thing - and discarded the whole theory, and made the Earth orbit around the sun. All of a sudden everything fit simply and beautifully. No need for "exceptions". Newton's theory didn't work at the edges - but instead of positing "exceptions", Einstein took that as a clue that the whole theory needs revision - and that's how science works, and for that matter how modelling works. The model is always imperfect and simplifies and the exception is a clue to move on to the next one. The ONE thing we never do is try to fit reality to the theory - it is ALWAYS the other way around. Discard the theory. Let reality be your guide.

Same here. How come was he an "exception"? Clearly it must mean that "experience" and familiarity with "rules" is not the primary, foundational element from which creation springs. Because Wells, had no film experience. In fact, for those paying attention reality tells us LOUD AND CLEAR that experience is not primary - because as he made more and more films, and so was accumulating more and more experience, he never matched his work with no experience "Citizen Kane". That's our clue that something else is at work. Combatenthropy alluded to it - an artist may intuitively do what's effective and so seemingly follow rules, even though the rules appear only in retrospect to the critic and not to the artist. He used his artistic judgment. When that deteriorated, so did his films, even though with each film he was accumulating more and more "experience" and presumably greater and greater familiarity with "rules". As I said before - and artist doesn't NEED theory, or to even study it consciously - what s/he needs is to hone his/her artistic judgment.

But on the other hand you suggest that people watch a lot of movies to learn, which to me is like saying go to film school but only kinda. These things appear in opposition to me.

Ah, but not so - there is no real opposition - in fact, in my earlier post, I wrote - and I'll bold the parts relevant here:

OldCorpse said:
[...]Watch movies to see the possibilities the medium offers and expand your horizons of what can be done, but focus on the involving the audience and don't worry about theory[...]
Click to expand...

In other words, you watch movies not to learn "rules", but for inspiration, for expanding horizons, for seeing the world of possibilities, for breaking the patterns, for the fresh and the innovative. Many directors have said, "going to movies was my film school" - and so often report that when they say a given film it blew them away precisely because it did NOT follow a pattern, "it showed me what was possible!" - it is inspiration, not a search for rules, a search for "exceptions" that blow apart the theory. Nobody goes to the movies to confirm for the 29873th time that a rule exists, but to see the exception, something FRESH and new, not the same old, same old. Quentin Tarantino loved that aspect of film outsider and outside of patterns, which is why his production company was "A band apart" inspired by the French New Wave and explicitly cited by him because it was "APART" from the mainstream. You don't go to movies to learn the old patterns but to seek inspiration from something NEW. As I said in another post in this thread:

OldCorpse said:
[...]1) Watch a ton of different movies. Learn from them, and in particular learn that as long as the story is involving, the design simply does not matter.
Click to expand...

What you learn is not the rules, but how irrelevant they are - and to learn that a story can be involving NO MATTER what rules it falls under or doesn't fall under. The key is not the rule, but the involvement - you don't even have to know the rule to break it, and indeed it can be helpful not to know it so you aren't hobbled by it. So you see, no conflict in my recommendation. Learn, learn to hone your judgment, not rules, learn the world of possibilities and what thrills you and by extension, your audience.

Tarantino did watch a lot of movies at the video store where he worked. He also read books about movie and — hey guess what? — film theory and writing.

Eh? I read a lot about QT and I have never come across information that he read books about film theory and writing. He read books, especially crime novels and pulp stuff, but film theory - not that I ever came across. I did come across this neat quote though (bold mine):

"Quentin Tarantino is a man who came to Hollywood and didnt break the rules so much as make plain that he didnt even notice them."

I’m not sure what people think happens in film theory and writing classes, but my experience is that people watch a lot of movies and then they discuss them to figure out what does and doesn’t work for them.

I think we're getting to the crux of the matter. I think that's exactly the danger of emphasizing rules and theory. At all. I say, watch the movie, but DON'T start creating theories, or trying to analyze it by reference to ANY theory. Just react, and respond - and that's all you need for discussion, not theory. That's exactly what is wrong, because the theory is necessarily reductive as a model for the work of art. It is necessarily flawed. By its very nature. No matter the theory, it is like a lens that will always involve some distance and distortion from the reality - and so be imperfect and therefore misleading. Imagine that someone is always insisting on putting on glasses of various tints and lens qualities and keeps changing them to fit better with other evidence of reality, when someone says - just don't put on the glasses in the first place! Because the moment you put them on, you distort. The moment you apply ANY theory to a film, you've already distorted the experience of film and its artistic content. Period. There is a powerful psychological mechanism at play. You see what you are conditioned to see - and people who are convinced of something with powerful preconceptions often can literally not see what's right in front of their eyes - we know that from police work and witness recollection. Your ideas distort what you see. It is much better to approch the work with NO preconception, with NO theory, just reacting, letting it affect you, noting your own reaction, just trying to experience it as completely as possible, taking nothing for granted. When given a theory, it is like being given a tool, say a hammer - all of a sudden everything looks like a nail, even if in reality it is not a nail at all. It is how you get filmmakers who get ahold of a tool and suddenly it's all over the place whether it belongs or not (see: shaky handheld camera).

The theory influences what you see, so you no longer can see other than through that prism, and since theory is always limited, and frequently plain wrong, you get inferior results. This is how you get folks misdiagnosing problems with screenplays using a fashionable theory of the day - a hollywood writer reported how during the era when "a character's background" was super fashionable in critical analysis, it would be slapped onto whatever flaw the screenplay had - and he remarked upon how when he added faster action all of a sudden the concern with "character background" vanished - what happened is that the script was slow and the wrong answer was "more character background" when the right answer was faster action so nobody had even time to ask for "character background". Stop with the theories! Watch the movie, and respond - don't try to fit it into the 50 or 55 boxes of movie tropes you learned or were told existed (7 stories) etc. - you're trying to fit reality into your theory. Don't do that. Let it breathe.

"Oh, but I will always use the right theory" - sure you will. Except since it is always limited, you will always miss something - at which point you'll claim "exception!". Nope. Take off your tinted glasses and put down the hammer - just watch and respond with your senses and your artistic judgment. Get it directly, not mediated through theory or preconceptions. "I liked this, I didn't like that" - YES. "I didn't like it because he didn't complete the hero's journey" - NO. In the first case you are responding naturally to the work, just as the audience does. In the second case you're auditioning for a critic's job. Make a decision - are you going to be a creator and artist? Then experience art directly and use nothing but your senses and your judgment, without the "theory" interloper.

Combatentropy's experience is exactly what happens - the result of an artist's work might be analyzed as obeying this rule or that, but the artist didn't arrive at it through following any rule, but his judgment. "Oh, I see you used the rule of thirds in placing the horizon!" "No, I just liked it in that place, so that's where I put it" "Oh, I just saw that you violated the rule of thirds to great effect, good that you knew about the rule of thirds first, so you could violate it" "No, I just thought that that's where it fit, I paid no attention to any rule".

Anyhow, why repeat something just because it's been told a million times? It can stil be wrong. Look how absurd it sounds: "Oh, I see you violated a rule, and you did that because you knew the rule first so you could violate it, ha!". There is an amusing TV series "Adam ruins everything" and in one episode he discusses how modern anatomy sprung from ONE Dutch scientist who simply decided to use his eyes - because... and this is how UNBELIEVABLE human beings can be... for centuries doctors relied on an old text written by a guy who used animal caracases to describe internal organs and their placement IN HUMANS! And for CENTURIES people were puzzled as to how often there were "exceptions" until this guy decided to actually, you know, LOOK at corpses and autopsy them, and then he still got pushback, because it "contradicted the established book"! Amazing. That's the power of suggestion and authority and the distorting lens of theory. Theory will change the more we know. Just as scientific theory exists only to be proven wrong and superceded by a better one. What doesn't change is reality, the art, no matter how much the analysis and theory does. Maybe it's a hero's journey that made us cry and maybe that's all bunk and we just like the light in that room. Don't worry about the theory - use your own eyes, your senses, and your judgment.

Final anecdote from a couple of centuries back physicists proved that according to the physics theories of their days a bumblebee cannot fly. Only the bumblebee didn't know the theory and kept on flying. So too here - an artist doesn't need to know any theory at all, they can create quite well without it. Perhaps one day critics will catch up as physics caught up with bumblebees, but in that time the bumblebee will continue to fly all along and the artist create, unconcerned with the theory of the day. That's what Combatentropy does, and allows the rule spotters to work afterwards.

There are no timeless "rules" in art, there is only the creation, and the audience reaction. So make sure that what you create is involving for the audience. Get inspired, hone your judgment, use it and trust it. Don't worry about "theory" or "rules" and leave that to the critics. One day they'll catch up and revise their theory, but by that time you wil have already moved on and created something new that (shocking!) broke some rule from yesterday :)
 
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