film theory – Vargoing

Stranger Than Fiction

Here’s a screenplay pitch for you. Psychology professor by day, undercover cop by night. Not just an undercover cop, but an undercover cop posing as a hit man. In this least, I hope you say, “Go on.” On top of that basic premise, this psychology professor is the kind of forgettable, mild-mannered dweeb you fist imagined, but his hit man persona is a mix between Dirty Harry and John Wick. And as his college classes delve into questions about id and identity, he starts to wonder who he really is. When we get to the crisis moment, however, he’s no longer wondering if his true calling had always been undercover cop. He’s wondering if his true calling had been a real hit man.

That’s the premise of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man on Netflix. Seems like a surefire blockbuster. It’s even based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a psychology professor who had been moonlighting as an undercover cop for the Houston Police Department in the 80’s and 90’s. He’d been profiled by Skip Hollandsworth in Texas Monthly a few years ago. The problem, however, is that Linklater cleaved too closely the source material, creating a decent biopic rather than a blockbuster movie. I want to briefly delve into what didn’t work.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Hit_man_2024_film.jpg

The big problem with this movie is that screenplays are complete fictions. While they may be based on real life, they are not real life. Real life is chaotic and absurd. Screenplays (hopefully) are not. Everything in a screenplay should be intentionally placed there to form a tight, cohesive narrative–a sort of logical argument. If A, then B; if B, then C; and so on until you end up with hopefully a logical and fulfilling conclusion.

I’ll defer to Anton Chekov here who rephrases what I’m trying to say much more directly and cleanly. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” The screenplay for Hit Man, however, includes numerous unfired pistols. These come directly from Hollingsworth’s source material, and while they are fascinating glimpses into the human psyche, they do not progress the narrative or Gary Johnson’s growth as a character. (Keep in mind here that Gary Johnson the character is different than Gary Johnson the person.)

Here are three bizarre, true anecdotes from Hollingsworth’s article that Linklater chose to keep in the movie (despite their irrelevance to Johnson’s story). The first is an example of how a person starts looking for a hit man: a seedy gentleman asks a stripper(?!) if she could recommend anyone. Second, Hollandsworth writes about a teenager who wanted to off one of his classmates (changed to his mother in the movie). Third, he relates a family inheritance dispute that ends up with a brother forgiving his sister for trying to hire a hit man. The judge in the case grants her probation. All three of these anecdotes are crazy and fascinating, but I argue that you could cut them without losing anything. In fact, you’d have a better movie, and here’s why.

Go back to that first paragraph I wrote. If this movie is exploring whether or not Gary Johnson wants to become a real hit man, how exactly does the high school student fit in? Why is it important for the audience to go to the strip club and eavesdrop on two characters (the seedy patron and stripper) who we’ve never met and will never see again? In short, it’s not.

This is Gary Johnson’s story. Those scenes are deviations from that story. While they do show the diversity of clients that Johnson must deal with and his ability to read a variety of clients, we have another dozen characters in the “Undercover Gary Montage” that do the same thing. That makes those scenes unnecessary. Worse, it also makes them confusing.

At the point where we meet the teenager, this movie has established that Johnson is working with a variety of unsavory people and becoming increasingly comfortable in his role as a “hit man.” If we, the audience, see a deviation from norm that the screenplay has established for unsavory people (in this case because of age), the teenager becomes Chekov’s gun. We expect the story to pivot at this point. There is a complication to the movie’s “ordinary world.” The main protagonist must overcome this new obstacle and learn something about themselves. But…he doesn’t.

The other two scenes operate in a similar fashion. While they’re both interesting anecdotes (How does someone find a hit man? What happens after you learn that someone hired a hit man to kill you?) they aren’t central to the plot. They don’t tell us anything about Johnson’s new identity. Instead they introduce irrelevant characters and locations. They are “pistols” that never get fired. In the logical argument that is Gary Johnson’s story, they are Red Herrings.

It’s important to point out that Gary does have a meeting with a unique client that causes him to change his entire operation. Madison Masters is an attractive young woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Rather than going through with the sting, he suggests she get out of the relationship. He also begins to wonder if some people are, perhaps, legitimate targets for a hit man. That’s the crux of the movie. This is where things get interesting. This is in fact the inciting incident. Those other three anecdotes should have been left in the Hollingsworth’s profile piece.

Additionally, the movie suffers from an overused, uninteresting voiceover. And Gary Johnson’s character fails to adequately differentiate his “real” self and his hit man persona. What are we left with? An okay biopic that takes a handful of major liberties from the source material. As Hollandsworth’s original article proves, the truth is often stranger than fiction. Good fiction, however, is far more focused than reality.

Ceci Continue de ne pas Etre une Pipe

Photo manipulation is nothing new, and for anyone growing up in the digital age, Photoshop has morphed from a proprietary digital editing program into a verb. Taking it a step further, Google Pixel’s Magic Editor puts Photoshopping right into the palm of your hand. The smartphone app allows you to move, resize, or even delete items from an image. Not happy with what your camera captures in the first place? Canva, Dall-E, Firefly, and other software lets you conjure up any image you can verbalize. Don’t feel encumbered by your lack or experience or, for that matter, reality. We used to say, “It’s only true if there’s pictures.” That’s certainly not the case any more. But was it ever?

In the commercial and theatrical world, professional filmmakers intentionally alter reality. They use all kinds of tricks to make things intimidating, pretty, ugly, or endearing. Makeup, costumes, and lighting turn a perfectly charming Emilia Clarke into the Mother of Dragons.

But these tricks are still in play even if you don’t use them intentionally. Here are two pictures of a friend of mine at a mud run.

In the first, you can clearly see the falling rain. (No, those aren’t orbs…) In the second, you can see that it is still raining if you look at the water. But the change of angle and focal length means you can no longer see the falling rain. (This is the same reason why it sometimes looks like it’s barely sprinkling at rained out sporting events.) I didn’t hide the rain intentionally, but that’s the reality of the situation.

The important thing to remember is, consciously or not, all media is an interpretation of reality. When you’re on vacation and take a picture, it captures some part of the moment, but it isn’t a recreation of the moment. You’re limited by the abilities of your camera. You choose to photograph the Grand Canyon not the parking lot next to the Grand Canyon. You crop out the guy wearing that ridiculous Hawaiian shirt. And what about the people in your photo? Are they like my nephew, who for two years refused to smile any time someone pointed a camera at him? Or do they ham it up for the camera in the hopes of becoming an internet star?

This is nothing new. Film has been an interpretive art since its inception. Below are two of the earliest war photographs ever taken. These are from the Crimean War in 1855, twenty-three years before the first movie was made.

Both show a scene of desolation strewn with cannonballs. But it’s the second one that would make photographer Roger Fenton famous. Simply put, it’s a more striking photograph. Fenton wanted to show the horror and destruction of war, but he was restricted by his cumbersome film equipment. His solution? Move the cannonballs onto the road to take advantage of the high contrast. Although it was much more labor intensive than Photoshop, it’s the same basic principle. He altered his photo for effect. He sought a deeper “Truth” that wasn’t reflected in “reality.”

In the late 1920s, surrealist painter Rene Magritte created this thoughtful painting called “The Treachery of Images.”

the-treachery-of-images-this-is-not-a-pipe-1948(2)

If you don’t know French, the text reads, “This is not a pipe.” Of course it’s not a pipe. It’s a painting. It represents a pipe. Our brains conceive of it as a pipe, but it is not a pipe. The same holds true for all media.

A definition might be helpful here. Media is the plural of medium. The two definitions that come to mind are medium (size), as in the size between small and large and medium (fortune teller), as in someone who communicates between the living and the dead. Both contemporary definitions share the same Latin route, medias, which simply means middle. It shouldn’t surprise you that our news sources are generally referred to as “the media.” They are the middlemen. They transport ideas from the source to us. But along the way, they must interpret it.

Media is also used in the art world to describe the material that an artist uses. You may see the phrase “mixed media on canvas.” This medium might be oil paint, latex paint, clay, canvas, silk, steel, analog audio recording, digital video recording, computer programs, or even food. The point is, the artist interprets the world through this medium. Film, as an artistic endeavor, is its own medium. But never forget that the six o’clock news, the news radio traffic report, and the Wall Street Journal all operate in artistic mediums. To explain in more detail, I’d recommend listening to Malcolm Galdwell’s Revisionist History podcast from a 2017.

In it, he discusses this famous photograph from Birmingham in 1963.

It seems to show a police officer unleashing his dog on a black protester. But it doesn’t. The man in the photograph wasn’t part of the protest. He wasn’t a “Foot soldier,” as the Civil Rights activists called themselves. And the police officer hadn’t unleashed his dog on him. If you look closely, both men seem surprised and the police officer is leaning back, trying to pull the dog away. But that’s not what the nation saw.

This photo highlighted the brutality of the Jim Crowe south. It represented the discrimination, the institutionalized hate, and the lynchings. It shifted public opinion to the side of the Civil Rights movement, and it was all done on purpose. Bill Hudson, the photographer, chose this picture over the hundreds of other photos he had taken that day. The editor of The New York Times chose to put this story above the fold rather than any other news of the day. This is what a medium does. It takes the raw data, curates it, interprets it, and disseminates a cohesive message. In doing so, a medium must disregard data that fails to support its message or obfuscate its position. In its quest for “Truth,” it must necessarily deviate from “reality.”

To further clarify, look at Ronald S. McDowell’s statue inspired by Bill Hudson’s photograph.

The figure representing Walter Gadsen, the student, is considerably younger and shorter than he was in reality. The police officer is emotionless and inhuman, reminiscent of T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which came out four years before the sculpture was dedicated. The police dog’s mouth is wide open, bearing vicious, anatomically improbable fangs. But remember this is a piece of art. This is not a pipe.

The push and pull between film as art and film as documentation will never end. But as a filmmaker and consumer of media, it’s important to acknowledge that film is a medium. It is not reality. There is no magic bullet, no enforceable code of conduct, no ten commandments of filmmaking that will ever make film purely objective. Reality is reality. Film is film. The best thing you can do as both a filmmaker and a consumer is educate yourself.

It’s important to learn about technology, to learn what is possible and how to spot a fake. But it’s also important to learn about art. You know—art, that thing that gets cut when we want to tighten school budgets. Learn about artistic conventions. Learn to read the meaning behind how a frame is composed, how set decoration reinforces the theme, and how story arcs are constructed. Understand that models and movie stars are just people, too. Play with AI. Appreciate the complex and tragic story of Aaron Copland and Fanfare for the Common Man (examined here in another great podcast). See the allegory between Game of Throne’s White Walkers and climate change. Learn how Proust’s understanding of memory preceded neuroscience. Discover the 1920 play that introduced the word robot and the idea that robots are out to kill us. And, above all, recognize that just because you see a video of something doesn’t mean it’s reality. In fact it’s not reality. It’s just a video. And while there will be a degree of objective truth in it, there will always be a degree of the artist’s truth. After all, it is a video. It is not a pipe.

*NOTE: An earlier version of this blog appeared on this site in 2017. This version has been updated to reflect technological advances, specifically AI.

The Death of the Artist

In his book, The Death of the Artist, William Deresiewicz laments the decline and fall of the blue collar, professional artist. And while he unpacks a variety of legitimate and terrifying issues such as the unravelling of historic institutions and the job gobbling monster that is big tech (problems that affect everyone, not just artists), I feel like he misses a certain perspective about the motion picture industry. While the industry manages to sidestep many of the issues plaguing other artistic endeavors, it’s not avoiding them altogether. Because it’s a complex, multi-layered situation, I think it might be instructive to look at the motion picture industry through the three specific lenses: technology, art, and business.

Technology (What is film?)

Deresiewicz differentiates between television and film, but it’s an arbitrary distinction. With the exception of the live or live-to-tape multi-camera shoot, production crews make feature films, television shows, and used car commercials the exact same way. Only a decade ago, we filmed thirty-second lottery commercials on 35mm Kodak. The question of “what is a film” has less to do with being “filmed” than how the content is delivered to an audience.

In that regard, feature films suffer from a major constraint: they need to be long enough to justify the price of admission but short enough to satisfy an audience before their legs fall asleep. To do that, many films rely on tropes and cliches to keep a story moving forward. The boom in quality television over the last decade has allowed filmmakers to explore more interesting stories in more depth than they ever would have been able to on the silver screen.

Are movie theaters dead? Well, not quite. Some nostalgic urge to hit the town and see a show will linger indefinitely. Movie theaters have yet to kill live theater, and a black and white silent movie won the Oscar for best picture in 2011. I can guarantee that ninety-minute visual storytelling will live on. It is true, however, that certain low-to-mid-budget genres are not currently profitable. Nevertheless, I’m not fully convinced that it’s a bad thing or that the trend won’t change.

Art (Are filmmakers artists?)

Deresiewicz defines four paradigms of artist: artisans (or craftsmen), bohemians, professionals, and producers. It’s the professionals—working artists who own houses and have dental plans—that Deresiewicz is most concerned about in his book. Chapter after chapter outlines how writers, painters, and visual artists fight for the crumbs of an ever-shrinking pie while struggling to find time to develop their art. And yet, in 2021, television and film are actually doing okay.

One of the big things I need to point out here is that television and film straddle the worlds between art and commerce more than other industries. True, you’ve probably heard of writers who cut their teeth in the newspaper industry (when that was a thing), but very few renown painters started off whitewashing fences.

On a film set, any given crewmember may have spent the previous day filming a television show or commercial. Disappointingly to most crewmembers, that often means that they’re capable of delivering a much higher quality product than the used car company requires, but it also means that art and commerce move around freely in the same space. Similarly, scenic painters, carpenters, costumers, and camera operators are highly educated, incredibly talented artisans operating at the top of their game. Not only do they need the vision to offer their own artistic input, they need to be able to shift gears to cater to someone else’s vision or mimic a historical style.

In that way, filmmakers really match Deresiewicz’s first paradigm—the artisan—and I think it’s a good model to follow. Although it really doesn’t matter to the IRS, Deresiewicz’s paradigm poses an interesting question: “Are filmmakers artists?” That’s hard to say. If Deresiewicz is looking for talented individuals who work in a creative discipline and can afford middle class lifestyles, then yes. We’ve found a winner. But if you define artists as individuals who create things that make you question and challenge the world… well maybe not. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the latter is far less economically viable.

It’s also worth pointing out that filmmakers have always been “gig” workers. A crewmember (even a director) may have multiple employers in a single week. By and large, the thing that enables filmmakers to buy houses and get dental plans is unions. As people are trying to cobble together livings by working Uber and Door Dash, I can’t stress enough how beneficial it would be to unionize.

Business (Are moving pictures safe from a flood of amateurs?)

On page 220, Deresiewicz states, “Film and television have a final advantage over arts like music or writing. Amateurs do not pose any threat because no one is ever going to mistake what they do for the real thing.” I have to disagree with him there. As technology has decreased cost, it’s become easier and cheaper for people to produce video content. Whether their productions can be considered art or even “feature films” is another matter. Birdemic is a prime example.

If you think I’m being dramatic, you haven’t noticed how much content Gen Z watches on YouTube. Poor production quality has become synonymous with verisimilitude, and young viewers have managed to lower their standards below even “reality TV” quality. True, in the world of fiction, no one’s going to mistake Tommy Wiseau for the next Spielberg, but it’s a troubling sign if you recognize the names Tommy Wiseau or Birdemic.**

The bigger problem here is that as audiences accept lower quality, they refuse to pay for higher quality. Consequently, production companies refuse to pay as well. Just earlier today, I was speaking with a coordinator who lamented that the latest money-saving trend is to not hire location managers. And after a year of looking at everyone’s terrible lighting skills on Zoom, I’m afraid the bar for quality has been irreparably lowered.

Where does that leave us?

Although not artists in the Van Gogh or even the Andy Warhol sense, filmmakers do work in creative fields, and they can make a decent living. Artisans produce work that is beautiful and functional. Their work may be thought provoking but is seldom a “think piece.” In other words, film—and all twenty-first century art—needs some utility or usefulness (see The Death of the Artist pages 272-273). Within this paradigm, artists are producers. I like this concept. It’s more democratic and egalitarian than the concept of elite geniuses sprinkling culture to the plebes. Artists are useful members of society who produce goods that can also be beautiful and thought-provoking.

Consider the gorgeous pattern on this 1100-year-old Peruvian tunic. It is beautiful and useful, and I doubt that the person who made it had an MFA. Source: https://museum.gwu.edu/indigenous-american-textiles https://museum.gwu.edu/indigenous-american-textiles

That being said, our society is continuing to devalue labor and expertise. There’s no easy fix for this, but there is, perhaps, a silver lining. Art, throughout the ages, has always helped humanity cope with change and reframe tragedy into something that we can—if not understand—at least articulate. In the twenty-first century, art is not only doing this job metaphorically but literally instructing us on how to make a new economic paradigm. If you have a chance, check out Deresiewicz’s book. And if not, at least take a moment to check out some art.

**In many ways, Canon’s 5D Mark II, the first SLR camera to shoot full high-definition video, marked a depressing turning point. In 2009, every film school grad with $3,000 suddenly thought they were a director of photography. Today, the image quality and editing ability of a smartphone are more advanced than the professional digital equipment I used in the early aughts. But to reiterate a point Deresiewicz makes over and over again, just because some can paint or film or sing does not mean they have the professional experience or artistic eye to be an artist.

Smoking Pipes to Smoking Guns: The Deepfake

Two years ago, I wrote a post about some new technologies that were allowing video editors to create realistic videos of things that never happened. Today, we call them “Deepfakes.” I think it’s worth a re-read. In it, I argue that education–particularly arts education–is the most effective way to combat the Deepfake. After all, Deepfakes aren’t really new. We’ve been dealing with “fake news” and propaganda for hundreds of years. How would you have responded to this story from February of 1898? The U.S. went to war.

But it did have me wondering. What do we do with a Deepfake? How should we treat some kind of shocking video or audio revelation? I don’t exactly have a checklist, but I think we need to look at scandalous revelations holistically. What else supports this shocking news? Do the facts add up? Where did the evidence come from?

The problem is (and I acknowledge that Hollywood is largely at fault for perpetuating this myth), we are obsessed with the “smoking gun.” There will be some single, irrefutable piece of evidence that proves our point and wins the day. But as I say repeatedly on this blog, movies aren’t real life. “Smoking gun” evidence rarely exists, and when it does, it’s usually not enough to prove much of anything.

Strangely, Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape offers a perfect case study for Deepfakes. Here we had a presidential candidate caught red handed saying absolutely repugnant things about women, about mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and loved ones. The Democrats thought this was it for his campaign. They finally had hard evidence of what a narcissistic, sexist pig he was. But it didn’t matter.

Everyone already knew all of that. They knew he didn’t respect women. They knew he was vulgar. They knew he was lewd. It didn’t matter. Trump didn’t even try to deny it. He could have decried it as a Deepfake, but he didn’t need to. The smoking gun was just that, all smoke and no fire.

Is it possible for some video of dubious origin to crop up at an inopportune time in efforts to sway the public’s mind? Yes. Should the NSA stay abreast of Deepfake technology? Of course. But I think the situation is overblown. McKinley didn’t need video evidence of the Maine explosion to invade Cuba in 1898. Bush didn’t need video evidence of WMDs to invade Iraq in 2003. The question is less about what kind of evidence we have and more about what kind of sources we gather that evidence from. Keep that in mind as the conversation continues.

Why Are Night Scenes Blue?

You’ve either seen it on one of those posts that point out some of the ridiculous “things we’ve learned from movies” or maybe you’ve even noticed it yourself. But right there along with always finding a parking spot in front of the courthouse and every tank you shoot with a bullet is highly explosive, you’ll discover that everything at night is perfectly visible, but slightly blue. What’s up with that?

Well, the first thing is, it has to be visible. As I mentioned in a previous post, film is a method of preserving light. No light? No movie magic. Blue helps indicate that something different is going on, mainly the passage of time. It’s one of those subtle things that Hollywood hopes you pick up on, but don’t really notice. But why blue?

Color Temperature

If you’ve been shopping for lightbulbs recently, you’ve probably seen this little diagram.

LED-Kelvin-Color-Temperature-Landing-Page_09

That’s right. Lights are different colors. Chances are, you’ve never even noticed this before. Your brain has a habit of calibrating to subtle differences. That’s why you don’t go insane with all of the noise in a city and you stop noticing the tint on your rose colored glasses after a while.

A Look At The World Through Rose-colored Glasses.

But if you pay attention, you’ll start to see nauseating scenes like this.

Filmmakers put a lot of effort into making sure this kind of catastrophe never appears on the big screen.

The thing is, you really don’t notice the different colors on their own. If the entire wall were orange or blue or green, the lights would have that distinct hue, but your brain would tune it out. It’s the comparison that makes it noticeable. What color is the sun? Well, it looks pretty blue when you compare it to a campfire.

campfire

Moonlight, after all, is just reflected sunlight. I don’t know about you, but I’d say that night scene is pretty blue looking.

The other major source of light we’ve had as humans has been the incandescent lightbulb, which also glows at a warm orange 3200K*.

lighted string lights hanging — Photo by Vitaly Vlasov on Pexels.com

So why color temperature?

There’s a bit of physics involved here, but the basic idea is that if you heat something to a particular temperature without it bursting into flames, it will start glowing. So an incandescent bulb (which glows because it’s being heated) is, in fact, pretty close to a temperature of 3200K.

Daylight is measured between 5500K and 6500K. The sun’s light is diffused by the atmosphere, so it’s a little bit of a moving target. But the actual surface temperature of the sun? 5778K. Not too shabby.

Fluorescent lights and LEDs do not use heat to produce light, but are still measured on the same scale.

More Science

Human eyes detect light with two different kinds of cells: rods and cones. Rods simply detect light, not color. Cones are sensitive to particular wavelengths of light and separate out small (blue), medium (green), and long (red). The other colors are made by blending wavelengths. At low light levels, only your rods will activate and the world will be a series of shadows and silhouettes. But as more light is introduced, the small cones may be activated, and you’ll start to see a little bit of blue first.

So don’t feel blue the next time you’re riding off into the moonlight, even if everything may look it.

Day_for_night

*Color temperature is measure in Kelvin (K), named after Lord Kelvin who created the absolute temperature scale. Since 0K is so cold molecules would stop moving, it’s also called absolute zero. (Yes, Andre 3000, that’s cooler than being cool.) Also, Kelvin is just Kelvin, not degrees Kelvin.

Lights, Camera, Action (Part 2)

Psychology of Lighting

Like all aspects of filmmaking, lighting has subtle, psychological effects on the audience. Knowing what these effects are and knowing how and when to use them will greatly enhance any film you make.

Low Key*: Darkly lit or low light scenes evoke a sense of mystery and danger, like this shot from The Shape of Water.

shape-of-water-online-678x381 — Image Source

High Key: Brightly lit scenes like the opening of La La Land tend to be happier.

Soft Light: Few or poorly defined shadows create a sense of fantasy. For example, I find dragons and armies of undead more realistic than the fantasy world created in Letters to Juliet.

letters-to-juliet-christopher-egan-1-600x300 — Image Source

Hard Light & High Contrast: Well defined shadows create a grittier look like Sin City.

Warm Colors: Orange hues can evoke warm feelings and romance.

Cool Colors: Blue is used to create a sense of cold or uncaring.

The previous two images are both from the movie Limitless. You’ll notice the color difference the most by looking at Bradley Cooper’s skin tone. Skin tone one of the first reference points audiences latch onto.

Other colors can be used to create a sense of unease, like something isn’t right. The Matrix, for example, was decidedly green.

Knowing the Toolkit: Skilled cinematographers, of course, can also use these techniques ironically or to create a new meaning with juxtaposition. One example is flash photography.

Flash Photo

You get this effect by having a harsh, bright light source right next to the camera (as you would on a disposable camera or smartphone). Things close to the camera (like faces) get washed out, while the background is underexposed. It also creates harsh shadows. (Look at the distinct black line on the left side of the red coat). It looks amateurish. But if you want your project to look like it was made by amateurs, this is your ticket. Thank you, Blair Witch Project.

One Final Thought

When you think about it, all movies, all TV shows, all video games, every viral video you watch on your phone is really a manipulation of light on a screen. The realty – the screen – remains unchanged. The meaning comes from your mind’s interpretation of that light and the story it creates. Controlling that light is the difference between staring at static and touching an audience.

*The “key” in “low key” and “high key” refers to the “key light” or main light source.

The Rules

You’ve probably come across a variety of blogs, books, and gurus who insist there are “rules” for writing a screenplay. (Maybe you’ve even read something to that effect on this very blog.) But are there really? Is there a secret formula for success? Well, yes… and no. Depends on who you ask. But maybe this is a better way to explain it.

An Analogy

Here’s one way to look at it. Screenwriting is like building a house. There are some generally agreed upon “rules” for houses: protection from the elements is a must. Generally a door to keep you and your stuff safe. Probably indoor plumbing and electricity. Bathroom and kitchen to make this a full service abode. Hopefully a window or two but otherwise…

The thing is, doors, electricity, and plumbing have rules. Doors need to be appropriately framed with headers. There are physical limitations to what you can do with electricity as well as safety precautions. Water flows downhill. If you want your sinks to drain and your toilet to flush, you’re going to have to install your plumbing correctly.

None of this has any bearing on the number or size of the bathrooms. None of it affects the shape of the house or the material you use. But there are definitely trends because some things are more effective or more efficient than others.

You have cheap houses for the masses.

Levittown-2

(Image via: http://longisland.mamasnetwork.com/2012/04/levittown-history/)

You have artistic houses for creative folks.

wing house

(Image via: https://davidhertzfaia.com/747-wing-house/)

You have rustic retreats.

cabin

(Image via: https://www.vrbo.com/335812)

And ostentatious abodes.

mansion

(Image via: http://www.mainlinetoday.com/Main-Line-Today/April-2015/The-Main-Lines-30-Most-Expensive-Homes/)

Point is: they’re all houses. They all meet the same basic requirements while expressing the art and lifestyle of the builder and the inhabitants.

Screenplays are similar, and many screenwriters will describe themselves more as craftsmen than artists. Yes, you need a creative mind, but you also need to know when to use a hammer and when to use a saw. Similarly, screenwriters need to be adept at understanding “the immutable laws of screenplay physics” as Blake Snyder calls them. Is your comic relief effective or overpowering? Does the story drag because the protagonist’s obstacles are episodic rather than escalating? Does the dialogue feel wooden because there is no subtext? Or maybe there’s no sense of urgency because your script violates the unity of time.

Or maybe your script feels cliched and predictable because it follows the rules a bit too closely. (This would be the home building equivalent of a stamped out, mass production condo.)

condos

(Image via: https://njcooperator.com/article/uniformity-in-condo-design/full)

And this is the final important thing to remember about the rules. Rules are meant to be broken.

Below are 2 examples of VERY successful movies that very clearly break screenwriting “rules.” I don’t care how much you want to bend the rules or try to contort things so they fit into some mold in a bizarro world. These are generally bad screenwriting choices, and yet, nobody cares.

Your Protagonist is not active enough.

Your protagonist should drive the story. Their decisions and actions push the movie forward. That’s why they’re the protagonist. Blake Snyder calls this “The Hero Leads.” And if your hero is just some schmuck who gets dragged from place to place like a cosmic lump on a log, Snyder calls him “Johnny Entropy.” But I have another name: Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge has probably gotten the most mileage out of doing the least work of any protagonist ever. Wikipedia lists 20 film adaptations of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and more than two dozen TV adaptations or episodes. But what does Scrooge actually do with all this screen time? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

scrooge 1

(I guess that’s why he’s in his pajamas for the whole thing. Image via: https://www.falter.at/the-vienna-review/2007/savoring-scrooge)

Marley, not Scrooge initiates the Christmas hijinx. Then the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future drag Scrooge on a time bending whirlwind. But apart from some tepid protests, Scrooge just goes along for the ride. Yes, at the end, Scrooge makes one massive 180 degree turn and starts giving his money away. But for the other 80 minutes of screen time, he’s as passive as Mr. Entropy himself.

The thing is, nobody cares. Since his creation 175 years ago, the audience has loved Scrooge’s largely unearned transformation from miser into philanthropist. And every ten years or so, a new production company capitalizes on Scrooge’s ability to do nothing and make cash. Do you always need an active protagonist? Well…

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(Image via: https://www.disneyclips.com/imagesnewb/ducktales.html)

Hook ‘em in the first 15 pages

It’s important to hook your audience in the beginning of your script. Fifteen to twenty pages/minutes is a good rule of thumb. It gives you some time to establish your “world” before you hit your characters with the inciting incident. And when you analyze a story, most professionals look at scripts from the perspective of the protagonist’s conscious goal.

In Jurassic Park, a beloved, award winning, visually stunning, and financially successful film, you could make an argument for any number of main characters, but I think many people would agree that Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is the protagonist. What’s his goal? To make it out of Jurassic Park alive. Well that can only be his goal if the dinosaurs have already escaped their pens, which means the power going out is the inciting incident, which means, the inciting incident doesn’t actually happen until almost an hour into the movie!

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(We don’t have eons here, Mr. Hammond. Image via: http://watchesinmovies.info/movies/jurassic-park-1993-2/)

Does that mean the power going out is the midpoint? Or should Spielberg have cut the first twenty minutes and had more screen time of Grant trying to save children from velociraptors. Or maybe you don’t always need your inciting incident in the first twenty pages.

You could make an argument for any of those things. But the bigger point is that Jurassic Park is a great movie and that the rules are not so hard and fast as they might appear.

As a filmmaker, it’s important to know the rules. Like a builder, you are part artist and part craftsman. The “rules” are more of a user manual than a blueprint. They’ll help you understand how a screenplay works without really telling you how to make one. So don’t cling to the rules like a Dickensian judge. Successful movies, like life, find a way.

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(Image via: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1167541/European-courts-powerful-says-British-judge.html)

Don’t Cross the Line!

Believe it or not, filmmaking comes with a lot of rules. And while artists may scoff at some seemingly arbitrary conventions, it’s important to know why they exist and how they can affect your audience and artistic vision. Today’s topic for discussion is the 180 degree rule.

Don’t cross the line!

The 180 degree line is an imaginary line that follows the action of a scene. (If you’ve never heard of it, it will make more sense as we go along.) For those of playing at home, you may recognize that 180 degrees is half of a circle. The rule dictates that your camera will always be on the same side of that line.

Who the F#€& came up with that?

Part of this is just physics. If you’re watching something (a sporting event, a street fight, paint drying) you tend to watch it all from the same place. If you want to change your perspective, you can walk to the other side of the stadium, but it’s going to take you a few minutes.

The ancient Greeks, who basically invented western civilization (and also theater) and are frequent this blog’s whipping boy, decided to set things in stone. Literally. They started building all of these amphitheaters.

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(Image via: https://www.athenswalkingtours.gr/blog/index.php/2011/11/04/the-great-theatre-of-epidaurus/)

You’ll notice that all of the seats are on one side. (It’s almost like half of a circle?!) The front of the stage makes a straight line, which taken as a whole, is called the proscenium. It is betwixt this line the actors and audience shall not cross.

Here’s another ancient theater with a much fancier proscenium.

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(Image via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Theatre_of_Orange)

And here’s a view of a modern theater proscenium.

proscenium theater

(Image via: https://www.tes.com/lessons/H18uvEDH3eMUDA/copy-of-copy-of-types-of-stage-in-performance)

In all of these cases, you can only watch the action from one side of the stage. As a spectator, whether you’re in seat B6 or FF139, you’re always watching on the same side of the line.

Now if we build a set on the stage, there would only be three walls. Much like this living room set from Malevolence: Bereavement.

MALEVOLENCE FIELD

When you build three walls of a set, the “fourth wall” is the proscenium. The audience must pretend that there’s a fourth wall. And that’s why an actor speaking directly to the audience (or looking straight into the camera) is “breaking the fourth wall.”

house of cards fourth wall

(Image via: http://www.businessinsider.com/house-of-cards-times-kevin-spacey-talks-to-audience-2015-2)

Millennia later, film followed suit, generally filming all of the action from one side of the line. In addition to following an established dramatic convention, it also makes it easier to film. The lights, camera, dolly track, sound mixer, additional second second assistant director and therapy dog all have a place to hang out without mucking up the set.

(Image via: http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=216)

What does it all mean?!

Moving from a wide shot to close ups, filmmakers need to make sure they stay on the correct side of the line. Consider two people sitting at a table, talking.

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Sally, on the left, is looking towards the right frame of the camera. When you move in, she STILL needs to be looking to camera right.

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Even in a closeup without Harry in the shot, she’s still looking to the right.

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Similarly, Harry should always be looking to his left.

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(Screen shots from When Harry Met Sally’s infamous restaurant scene.)

A simple situation like this is pretty easy and straightforward, but it would also make for a boring cinematic universe. The good news is, actors can move. And every time the actor or camera moves, so does the line. In fact that 180 degree line is more appropriately called the “action line.” And when things are moving, that line can go all over the place.

Long Steadicam or handheld shots like this work because the audience can follow the action in real time. It’s when you cut to a new camera angle that things can get confusing.

For example, if someone exits frame to the right, which direction should they enter the frame from in the next shot? If there are six characters standing in a circle, what is the direction of the action? If a character hands a prop to another character whose back is turned, should he be reaching camera left or camera right?

Fortunately, the script supervisor and director of photography should be keeping track of all of this. If you’re an aspiring DP or scripty, well, you’ve got some research to do. (I would recommend Joseph V. Mascelli’s The Five C’s of Cinematography to start.) But the intricacies of continuity and action lines aren’t the real reason I wanted to write about this.

Who cares?

Although this won’t really affect the writer, the 180 degree rule has some interesting psychological effects that influence storytelling. For example, if two people… or Matchbox Cars are chasing each other, they need to be traveling in the same direction.

If we turn one of the cars around, they may be headed for a collision.

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Similarly, if your character drives from left to right on his commute into work, he should drive from right to left on his way home. Odds are, no one will ever notice whether or not you do this, but it’s one of those subconscious things that can disorient an audience if done incorrectly.

Mascelli goes so far as to argue that vehicles traveling west to east like an airplane flying from New York to London should move left to right on screen. I guess that wouldn’t apply to Australian filmmakers…

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(Image via: https://www.mapworld.com.au/products/australia-upside-down-world-map-in-envelope)

Once upon a time things that traveled from left to right were considered to be progressing while things that traveled right to left were regressing or retreating. (Presumably because most western languages are read left to right.) Curiously, that doesn’t seem to hold as much weight as it used to. The Eagles, the only team in the NFL whose logo faces the left finally won a Super Bowl.

NFL logos

(Look at those contrarians in the last column!)

And a not too distant political campaign with a right-pointing arrow didn’t end up working out so well.

The line can also effect how you feel about a character. The furthest you can get from the 180 degree line is 90 degrees. This is the most objective or voyeuristic point of view. You’re not part of the action, you are an outside observer.

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(Not sure what’s happening on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and I’m pretty happy at this distance.)

As you get closer to the line, you become more subjective to the point where characters are speaking directly to you (breaking the fourth wall), and you feel like you’re part of the story.

That’s a hefty workload for one little line.

When can you break the rule?

When ever you want! The thing to remember is that audiences have become accustomed to these conventions. Breaking the rule will lead to confusion and disorientation. If that’s the feel you’re going for, do it! Just make sure the audience can still follow the story. (Remember that post about empathy? You want to be sure you’re showing your character’s confusion, not just confusing the audience.)

But for 99% of what you shoot, the 180 degree line is going to serve as a tool, not an artistic choice. To get to the heart of your story as effectively as possible, make sure your audience is focused on the right thing, and don’t cross the line!

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(Screenshot from The Big Lebowski via makeameme.org )

This Is Not a Pipe

Photo manipulation is nothing new, and for anyone growing up in the digital age, Photoshop has morphed from a proprietary digital editing program into a verb. Now, with a few intuitive swipes on a smartphone, you can turn your mediocre vacation photos into vintage “instagrams,” crop, distort, color correct, add text, and even add special effects to your videos. While most of this computing power is used for cheeky fun, everyone holds in their hands the ability to make photo-realistic, doctored images. “It’s only true if there’s pictures.” Not necessarily.

Until recently, audio and video manipulation were only possibly if you had a large team of special effects professionals at your disposal. Doctoring video and audio recording simply took too much computing power. Now, that’s no longer the case. Two new technologies will allow you to manipulate video and audio recordings with the same ease as Photoshop.

The first allows simple drag and drop editing of audio files. The most of advanced of these, Adobe’s VoCo, will seamlessly enter typed text into previously recorded audio files. Without recording any additional audio, you can generate a new file of Neil Armstrong’s famous moon landing that reads, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Or, “That’s one small step for a woman, one giant leap for mankind.” Or, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for your mom.” As long as you have twenty minutes of previously recorded audio file, the program can generate whatever new audio you want. This is particularly troubling for public figures who have days worth of audio files easily accessible to the public. In theory you could make an actor, athlete, or politician say whatever you want. The repercussions should be obvious and disturbing. For a more thorough explanation and example, listen to this podcast from RadioLab.

The second technology (also discussed in the podcast) is a motion capture technology that allows for real time manipulation of video images. This is similar to the motion capture technology Hollywood uses to create anthropomorphic creatures like Gollum or King Kong. Here you can see a sample of an edited video of President Obama. If you look closely, you’ll notice some irregularities where the program could not satisfactorily meld the two videos. But the bigger point is that this technology is becoming cheaper, better, and more accessible.

Is this the end of trust as we know it? Can we no longer believe anything we see with our own eyes? That would be the case if you accept film as reality. But film isn’t real life. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time I say it. Usually, I’m pointing out that theatrical feature films are more exciting, prettier, simpler, and more entertaining than real life. But for this post, I’d like to look at things from the other angle. No film, no matter how realistic or “unedited” it looks is reality. It’s just a film. Film isn’t real life.

But these tricks are still in play even if you don’t use them intentionally. Here are two pictures of a friend of mine at a mud run.

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In the late 1920s, surrealist painter Rene Magritte created this thoughtful painting called “The Treachery of Images.”

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A definition might be helpful here. Media is the plural of medium. The two definitions that come to mind are medium (size), as in the size between small and large and medium (fortune teller), as in someone who communicates between the living and the dead. Both of course share the same Latin route, medias, which simply means middle. It shouldn’t surprise you that our news sources are generally referred to as “the media.” They are the middlemen. They transport ideas from the source to us. But along the way, they must interpret it.

In it, he discusses this famous photograph from Birmingham in 1963.

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To further clarify, look at Ronald S. McDowell’s statue inspired by Bill Hudson’s photograph.

It’s important to learn about technology, to learn what is possible and how to spot a fake. But it’s also important to learn about art. You know—art, that thing that gets cut when we want to tighten budgets. Learn about artistic conventions. Learn to read the meaning behind how a frame is composed, how set decoration reinforces the theme, and how story arcs are constructed. Understand that models and movie stars are just people, too. Appreciate the complex and tragic story of Aaron Copland and Fanfare for the Common Man (examined here in another great podcast). See the allegory between Game of Throne’s White Walkers and climate change. Learn how Proust’s understanding of memory preceded neuroscience. Discover the 1920 play that introduced the word robot and the idea that robots are out to kill us. And, above all, recognize that just because you see a video of something doesn’t mean it’s reality. In fact it’s not reality. It’s just a video. And while there will be a degree of objective truth in it, there will always be a degree of the artist’s truth. After all, it is a video. It is not a pipe.