Tom’s Favorite, if Not Magnificent, Seven. Well, all right, Eight.

Creative Screenwriting editors Sam Roads and John Davis suggested that I should do something special for this 150^th issue of “Understanding Screenwriting”. So we tossed around a few ideas (we are very collaborative at CS), before coming up with this two-part ‘Best Of’ anthology, taken from the various columns I have written since US moved to Creative Screenwriting in 2013.

These are not necessarily items about the best films I have reviewed, and the last of them is one that I –  but not millions of others – thought was awful. But at the risk of sounding other than my true humble self, I have selected items I think I wrote well on, as I mention more than once in my brief introductions.

The items selected raise interesting questions about screenwriting, and show the solutions the writers did or did not come up with. As you will see, I write about films in different ways, which I’ve always thought was part of the franchise. That should help you expand how you think about movies.

Ready? Here we go with Part One.

#8 Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips is an interesting challenge in writing a script about a true story, based on the major character. It is also structurally rather complicated, and it gives us a look at how a director deals with a script, especially in the final scene.

Pirates Not of the Caribbean

When Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were writing their script for the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, they came to a simple realization: “We didn’t want to make a movie about real pirates. We wanted to make a pirate movie. There’s a difference.”

There sure is, and in Ray’s screenplay there is not a single “Yo ho, Yo ho,” nor a secret medallion, nor a dog with a key. Know the kind of movie you’re writing. This a movie about real pirates in the contemporary world, in this case off the Somali coast hijacking ships for ransom.

The script is based on the first-person account of Richard Phillips, captain of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, which was taken by Somali pirates in 2009. Ray has not fallen into the trap than many screenwriters working from autobiographical sources. Yes, Captain Phillips is the main character and star part, but we get some sense of the other members of the crew, and more importantly we see the pirates, particularly the four of them that end up on the ship, as individual characters. Since the second half of the film is mostly Phillips and the four pirates in the ship’s lifeboat, it enriches the script that we have some sense of who they are.

Early on we see them recruited to do the job, and we see the disagreements among the four of them. The opening sequence, in which Phillips prepares to go to sea and his wife drives him to the airport, is quiet and rather bland. I guess that is intentional on Ray’s part, but he could have done more with Phillips and especially his wife. If you are going to all the trouble to get Catherine Keener for the part, you’d better give her something to do.

When Phillips boards the ship, the interest picks up. We have not had a great sea movie about cargo ships since…uh, maybe never. So we watch Phillips go about his work being a captain, and the film becomes partly a procedural: so that’s how they do that on cargo ships. Soon enough they are under attack, and in a nice twist, Phillips out maneuvers the pirates and gets away.

But they come back and with four guys with guns take over the ship. They want money and Phillips says he has $30,000. Muse, the leader, asks if Phillips thinks he looks like a beggar. Well, he does, but he hopes for a bigger score for his bosses. So there is a lot at stake. Phillips and the crew manage to disable the ship, and Phillips and the pirates leave the ship in the lifeboat.

The Maersk Alabama is a United States-registered ship, which brings on the US Navy: a cruiser, an aircraft carrier, and the Navy SEALS. The suspense in the film is great, although it does get a little wearying for us (we are not as strong as Captain Phillips) before the final rescue. You may want to cheer the work of the Navy, and it is impressive, but you also may have a bit of sympathy for the Somalis.

Phillips is rescued and taken aboard one of the Navy ships, where he is checked out by a Navy corpsman, or corpswoman in this case. The first version of this scene was more conventional: Phillips, all cleaned up, talks to his wife on the phone (which is why they may have hired Keener). They shot it, and it was O.K., but not great.

Someone said Phillips would have gone to the infirmary first. According to director Paul Greengrass, they went down to the infirmary, grabbed the corpswoman and said to just do what you would regularly do in that situation. Her medical professionalism is a great counterpoint to Phillips’s emotional state. His lines are basically those in the original script, but played in a slightly different context. It is a great scene, with some of Tom Hanks’s (Captain Phillips) best work. And that is saying a lot.

Greengrass talked about the shooting of the scene in an interview in the Los Angeles Times. In another interview with the Times a month later, he let stand the interviewer’s suggestion the whole scene was improvised without a script. Somebody had obviously told him the directors’ branch of the academy would never nominate a director who admitted to more or less shooting the script. The first interview meanwhile did its damage. Greengrass was not nominated. 

 

#7 Non-Stop

Non-Stop I could not resist including because it has maybe my favorite snarky sub-head (that’s the headline about the title). I write those not only as click-bait, but to amuse myself. But I also think the item looks at writing a genre B movie in a really sharp and inventive way.

Alfred Kinsey, Amber Waves, Lady Mary Crawley, and Patsey Kick Serious Butt

Yes, this is another one of those Liam Neeson whoop-ass movies, in the vein of Taken (2008),Unknown (2011), and Taken 2 (2012). The writing is a little sharper here than in the earlier ones, and certainly more inventive than in the Taken films.

Here he is Bill Marks, a U.S. Air Marshal, but he starts out a mess. He doesn’t like to fly, and he has been drinking before he ever gets on the plane. The senior flight attendant, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, knows him, or at least knows he is the air marshal, so when he orders an alcoholic drink, she brings him a non-alcoholic one. Look at how that is handled without being obvious in the dialogue.

After a little maneuvering, he ends up sitting next to Jen Summers, the always welcome Julianne Moore. The other flight attendant you may or may not recognize from her award-winning role in 12 Years a Slave (2013). Lupita Nyong’o does not have as dramatic a part here as she does in Slave, but when the editor cuts to her, you can’t not watch her.

I mention the women in this film because they are better served by this script than the women in the previous Neeson action pictures were. See what I said about Famke Janssen in Taken 2 here.

The setup is that somebody contacts Marks on his confidential cell phone and says that someone will die unless Marks transfers a pile of money to an off-shore account. If he doesn’t do it in thirty minutes, the voice will kill one passenger. If he has not done it by thirty minutes after that, another will die.

Well, you try getting that amount of money in that sort of time. Marks talks to his boss, who tells him they have found that the account the money is to be sent to is in Marks’ name. The writers never show us the boss and it’s smart of them not to. For the majority of the film, we never get off the plane, which makes it all the more suspenseful. The writers are following in the giant footsteps of John Michael Hayes and his screenplay for Rear Window. You can stay in one location if you give us interesting characters to watch and interesting plot turns.

Here is where the women come in. Marks gets suspicious of people on the plane. Some look as though they could be thugs or terrorists. Some look innocent. One advantage of having classy actors like Moore and Dockery is that can seem both sympathetic and then suspicious. Remember that Dockery’s Lady Mary has a tough edge that the filmmakers here use effectively when they need to.

Eventually the baddies are discovered and the writers use a B-movie trick that had me laughing out loud. Obviously the whole setup of having a guy on the plane to handle the killing, rerouting calls, etc. was very complicated. When Marks asked how he did, the baddie dismisses it with, “It was easy.” It works here because this is the kind of a B movie script where you do not want a long explanation at the end of a fast-paced thriller. Whenever you think you will need a detailed explanation, remember that final scene with the psychiatrist in Psycho (1960). And restrain yourself.

#6 Boyhood

Boyhood is the script that involved the most degree of difficulty in writing of the ones I have written about, and the script worked out really well. Read the item if you want to write a very unconventional film.

Now That’s a Writing Challenge

Writing most screenplays is relatively easy. (Writing them well is a whole ‘nother story, which is what this column is about.)

If you are writing a script in a genre, you follow the rules of the genre. In a sci-fi movie you have one or more good guys who are battling, well, this year it seems to be large mechanical monsters. (One reason I was mildly amused by 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow was that the monsters were slimy, organic things rather than metallic ones.) You know the humans will fight and eventually win.

In a slasher movie, the slasher will kill a bunch of people, and then somebody will kill him, although there will be hints he survives for yet another sequel. And so on.

The structure is worked out early in the writing process, and the writing fills out that structure. The script can usually be shot in a couple of months with a cast gathered for the length of the shoot.

Linklater doesn’t do any of that in Boyhood. His idea back in 2002 was to follow a fictional boy as he grows up from six to eighteen, and shoot it over twelve years. So he started by writing scenes that establish Mason as six years old, the son of divorced parents. Mason has an older sister who causes him grief, as older sisters are wont to do. There was no way Linklater could know how that would turn out, or even if it would.

The project required that Ellar Coltrane, who plays Mason, to stick with the project for over a decade, and who knows how a kid will feel at all those times. He may have turned out like some of the subjects in the famous Up documentary series (the closest cinematic equivalent to Boyhood) who opted out of participating along the way. What happens if he gets run over by a bus when he is thirteen years old?

But those were production problems rather than writing ones. Linklater and the cast and crew would get together every summer for a couple of weeks and shoot some material.

As Linklater did with the second and third of his Before trilogy, he would stay in touch with Coltrane and the other recurring actors (the daughter is played by Linklater’s own daughter, and his mother and father by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) between shoots and collect suggestions from them about where their characters were emotionally. Coltrane developed an interest in photography in his teen years, and so did Mason.

What we get in the writing is not the usual tight structure of American films, but a much looser style. We meet mother’s second husband one year and he seems like a nice guy. Within a year or two it’s clear he’s an alcoholic. We get this not in a flow, but in the individual scenes in each year.

Her third husband goes through an abrupt change over three year, from an open, friendly Iraq vet to a very tightly wound corrections office at a local prison. We don’t get to watch the transition as we would in a “normal” screenplay, but in episodes. It’s a storytelling rhythm that takes a little getting used to. Like Linklater’s writing, we have to keep on our toes to make the connections.

And some things quite frankly don’t connect. At one point Mason starts in a new school, and the girls in his class look at him with interest, but there is no direct follow-up to that. Sometimes these one-time things work.

In the opening scenes Mason is a big video game fan, but as the film progresses, he seems to have dropped the games. In the middle of the film is a sequence of Mason and his sister going to the midnight release of the book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that captures the Potter craze perfectly, but Harry Potter is never referred to again. In 2008 Mason and his sister are putting up Obama/Biden signs in people’s yards. In Texas. This produces two confrontations, one you would expect and one you wouldn’t. And Obama is never mentioned again.

There are scenes and character that Mason connects with over the course of the film. His dad is a divorced (until the last few segments of the film), but he is very much part of Mason’s life, taking him on a camping trip and teaching him the true “Native American” way of putting out a campfire. And when Mason is getting over a failed romance in high school, dad gives him a nice speech on how to deal with romance in the real world.

We meet dad’s roommate Jimmy early in the film and we think he is just another pot-head musician wannabe. It is a surprise to us several years later when it turns out he has an actual music career. Life is like that, which is one point of the film. Stuff happens, some of it memorable, some of it not.

O.K., if all that is true, how can you end the film? It’s obvious there is not going to be a big finish. Mason is not going to blow up the Death Star, or even turn into Spider-Man. Like millions of other boys before him, he graduates from high school, and he starts college. Which at least temporarily gets him away from his parents and his high school teachers who keep telling him he’s not applying himself. For Mason that’s happy ending, and you can see how the material Linklater had laid in earlier pays off.

#5 Kings Row

Kings Row is one of a number of older films I have written about in the column. The item is one of the best accounts of the collaboration in the old studio system among the historical films I’ve done items on.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Directors

Casey Robinson was one of the greatest of all the Warner Brothers screenwriters during the thirties and forties. He wrote Errol Flynn swashbucklers (Captain Blood in 1935 made Flynn a star) and Bette Davis weepies (Dark Victory in 1939). In 1940 he was going off on a cruise in the Pacific and the head of production Hal Wallis gave him an advance copy of the novel Kings Row. Robinson read it on the ship and despaired of making into a movie.

It is a look at the dark side of small town America. Parris is in love with his childhood sweetheart Cassie, with whom he used to go skinny dipping as kids. She has grown up to be a nymphomaniac and is alas driven mad by her incestuous relationship with her father, Dr. Tower. Dr. Tower kills her and commits suicide. Parris performs a mercy killing on his terminally ill grandmother. Parris’s best friend Drake, with whom Parris may have had a homosexual relationship, is shagging two sisters who are the town sluts. A banker steals his inheritance, and he ends up on the wrong side of the tracks with Randy, a tomboy. He is hurt in a railroad accident, and the other doctor in town, Dr. Gordon, sadistically amputates Drake’s legs, one of many such operations he does.

Well, you can understand why Robinson got so frustrated that he went to the stern of the ship and heaved the book into the ocean. Just as it splashed down, he suddenly figured out how to do it. But he was in the middle of the ocean without the book. Never throw anything away.

(This story is from an interview with Robinson by Joel Greenberg is Backstory I: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by Pat McGilligan. There is a much longer version of the interview at the American Film Institute’s Louis B. Mayer Library.)

Robinson returned to Los Angeles and convinced Wallis it could be done. He also helped Wallis convince Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code office, that it was doable, even after Breen rejected the script. It was very useful to have a writer who could talk to Goeffrey Shurlock of the Code, as Robinson did.

Robinson’s shipboard revelation was to turn the nymphomania into insanity and to tell the story of Parris and Drake (minus the homosexual angle, of course) as young men growing up and accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. The skinny dipping and the nymphomania were cut (although in one scene in the shadows Cassie still shows an enthusiasm for sex, which in the forties was enough to suggest nymphomania).

There is no hint of the incestuous relationship and Dr. Tower kills her and himself because of the suggestion of hereditary insanity. The only hint of the mercy killing is a used hypodermic needle, but it may well have been used by Dr. Gordon.

Drake hangs out with the sisters, but in just a friendly way. We don’t know until well after the operation that Dr. Gordon cut off Drake’s legs when he didn’t have to. Robinson’s script is a model of how to avoid the censorship problems of the time.

You may well ask what that can for you as a modern screenwriter, when you can show almost anything on film and television. It shows you how you can be just as effective being subtle as you can being obvious.

Most likely it was cheapness of the studio that would not let the production build an entire small town. Robinson says it was director Sam Wood’s idea to show the town in bits and pieces, but other sources say that the great production designer William Cameron Menzies and the great Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe worked out the entire visual look of the film between themselves without talking to Wood.

They probably did talk to Wood, but the reason the film looks better than any other Wood film is because of Menzies and Howe. Wood was given their sketches for camera setups to follow, which he did.

For some reason Warner Brothers borrowed Robert Cummings from Universal to play Parris and he is just too shallow for the part. The supporting cast, all of them excellent, included Betty Field, Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Judith Anderson.

Randy was played by Ann Sheridan, and it provided a great boost to her career. Studio contract player Ronald Reagan gave his best performance as Drake, for which he was perfectly cast. To top it all off, Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed one of his greatest scores.

So here you have a great script, a great production design, mostly great acting, great cinematography, and a great score. You give a director all that and even a hack like Sam Wood can make a good picture.

The Countdown Continues!

[addtoany]