The Mechanic & the Muse

Time shifters--Moviemakers and their disordered narratives

David Denby, the New Yorker’s astute film critic, focuses his attention on movies that play with time and their audiences in an article of interest to storytellers, regardless of medium.

The entire piece is thought-provoking, but one passage in particular jumped out at me; it’s an homage to narrative that is under assault in movie theaters around the world.

"Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives."

But Denby’s focus, propelled by this year’s Academy Award nominated “Babel,” is about movie storytellers with a different impact, leaving “the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.”

Just as audiences became accustomed to non-Hollywood endings that refused to give us what we wanted (enemies falling in love, sympathetic characters who were not snatched from the jaws of death), Denby says we’re getting used to structures that bend time.

“All these movies draw on a sophistication about cinema that is now almost universal. We know that a film is not a piece of life; we know that it is something made. And we’re used to being shoved around in time—we may even be doing some of the shoving ourselves.”

Technology makes “new non-narrative movies” possible, for established filmmakers as well as anyone with access to ripping software who wants to create their own structure.

“Twenty-five years ago, the videotape transfer of a film sustained the notion of a movie as a continuous track: you could run it forward or backward, but the film was “printed” on magnetic tape, and you remained on the track. Digital information, on the other hand, can be infinitely manipulated; you can jump from one place to another or cut the movie into pieces. At home, kids create “mashups”—chopping sections out of a feature film, mixing the excerpts with their own material, and posting the result on the Web as a madcap original creation. “

But all that digital time-shifting, may come with a hefty price.

“The danger of instant editing, of course, is not just disordered time sequences but glibness. Some of the big Hollywood action films move so quickly that they eliminate the most rudimentary emotional attachment to the material. It would be terrible if computer editing wiped out the proper emotional resistance to making a cut—the lingering grave affection for a face, a landscape, an interior, even the resonance of an empty space.“

Here’s a filmography of the ”topsy-turvey narratives’ Denby discusses in the piece. You can learn more about them from the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com

Babel
Amores Perros
21 Grams
Adaptation
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Traffic
Syriana
Miami Vice
Betrayal
Pulp Fiction
The Good Shepherd
Un Chien Andalou
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Muriel
L’Avventura
Memento
The Lives of Others

Welcome back, Tony!

Like millions of faithful viewers, I've been suffering from Sopranos withdrawal ever since 2004 when the show went on, as they say in Hollywood, hiatus. The term usually means a show sucks and the producers order the writers to do something, anything, to make it better. To analogize, hiatus usually serves the purposes of a wake which prepares a show for burial. Not so for mobster Tony Soprano and his extended family.

So I was psyched last night when the first hypnotic bass notes thrummed the show's theme song, followed by the menacing opening lyrics,  "Woke up this morning, found myself a gun, Mama always said you'd be the chosen one."

Just as "snow, followed by small boys on sleds," a prediction made in the clever lead of a weather story, barrels of ink and millions of pixels alike -- raves and bashes  (haven't found any yet; please advise if you do) -- are certain to flow.

As a writer with one optioned script under my belt, I''m more interested in how creator David Chase and his writers create such compelling and irresistable drama. How do they get people to wait nearly two years?

Chase provided valuable clues in The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons. As I wrote in 2003, "What makes this collection invaluable for any student of the writing craft is the four-page introduction by Chase. In it, he reveals the writing process behind  The Sopranos, a series that reflects Chase's love for "the foreign films I loved as a young adult for their ideas, their mystery and their ambiguity..."

With their process in mind, it was fascinating to watch the story unfold . For anyone anyyone interested in learning from some of the best, check out the column, "How I Wrote the Sopranos: Deconstructing the Stories Behind the Bada-Bing," and see how Chase and his writers followed their forulal in episode one of what we are told will be the final installments of a story that is at once horrifying , hilarious, and for me, hugely entertainment.

Ought you be in pictures?

A savvy interview with lawyer turned screenwriter David H. Steinberg ("Slackers" and "American Pie 2") offers a healthy dose of reality to anyone interested in writing for the screen.

One of his most valuable tips points to a three-page section on character development in Lajos Egri's 1946 classic, "The Art of Dramatic Writing" that requires answers to questions such as "How tall is your character? What color eyes does he have? Where was he born?"

Steinberg says: "If you answer every one of these questions, your characters will be great. You have to be able to answer these even if it has nothing to do with your screenplay."

"I can tell you in 'Slackers' where these guys were born and what their characters are like. It has nothing to do with the script and it's not even in there, and you'd never know it. But I know the answers to all those questions. That's how you create three-dimensional characters. What does your character want? What does he need?"

Steinberg also offers an eye-opening perspective for those who think all you need to make it in the film business is a great idea for a movie.

"It's a myth that this industry runs on ideas. Ideas, even good ones, are a dime a dozen. This town runs on relationships and reputations for delivering good product. People are always saying, 'I want to sell my idea. I have a really good idea for a movie.' But ideas aren't worth anything. I heard some guy say once that he could come up with fifty good ideas for a movie in an hour, and it's probably true. You can come up with ideas all day long. Writing is about execution. Real writers make the idea work. They write the scenes, and the characters, and create drama and tension and comedy. And they use overlapping character arcs and subplots and subtext. That's the hard part."

The Steinberg interview appears on "Done Deal," a website which appears to have answers to every question an aspiring scriptwriter might have, from contracts to insider columns. It also offers a pay site, "Done Deal Pro," that for 24 bucks a year, lets you track on a daily basis script, book, treatment, pitch sales and options made in Hollywood each day. Its monthly newsletter is a freebie.