Developing Story Ideas Page 16
Problems/Strengths. Problems arise because “An Encounter” is told entirely in the first person; some problems are particularly evident in the opening pages wherein the narrator describes activities and brief situations that span a great deal of time. But these passages could easily be altered for the purposes of a short film. The narrative voice is a strong one, and it might be interesting to use some narration, [perhaps] an older man looking back on a formative encounter of his youth. This piece relates quite closely to my themes in that it once again deals with individuals taking steps over boundaries to confront something darker. The narrator’s life can never be the same now that he knows what exists on the fringes of his safe world. He will not have the simple, blind life that Mahony is intended to lead.
Peter is right; this first-person story does pose problems. However, if we ask to whom the main character might be telling the story, we see he could be addressing friends later in school or the boy who didn’t show up. In the telling, his narrated memories could turn into present-tense happenings, but unless the listener plays an active part, this device might seem ungainly and artificial. In this regard even Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is flawed, because it uses a servant as a narrator who plays no active part in the events. True, the reader quickly forgets her, but her physical presence in a film would be intrusive and unnecessary. Seeing this, we would quickly understand she is a screenwriter’s convenience.
A strength in Peter’s choice is that the main characters initiate the action. By rebelling against the suffocating, sheltered world of their school, and choosing the unknown delights of the docklands, they become energetic adventurers—until, that is, the advent of the perplexing older man, whose dominant characteristic is a masked sexual frustration.
So, what is this older man trying to get, do, or accomplish? By urging the boys to share their amorous experiences, he seems in search of vicarious excitement. But surely he knows they have none, and is after something else? His insidious, chummy manner suggests he is probing the remaining boy’s vulnerability. This is unsettling and points toward pedophile “grooming” (systematic breaking down of a child’s resistance to sexual intentions). The boy senses something overheated in this and takes flight (as I remember doing at a similar age). What makes the story poignant is that the central character is young and sensitive, and he may come to regard all adult sexuality as tainted. His friend Mahony remains untouched because his sensibilities are too coarse to be receptive.
Asking what a character trying to get, do, or accomplish is the key to getting inside them. Each new round of answers reveals new subtexts, new underlying motivations. Apply this simple inquiry to the life going on around you, and note all the agendas you now see. If you really want to challenge yourself, try keeping tabs on your own motivations.
Example 2: “Le Dîner de Cons,” by Francis Veber (Louis Leterrier)
This is a fairly recent short story. Its French title can be translated as “Dumb Supper.” The author is Francis Veber, a well-known French author-director. Some of his most famous work has been remade in such Hollywood films as The Toy or, more recently, The Birdcage.
Summary. It’s Thursday night and for Peter Brochant and his friends it is Dumb Supper day. The rule of this game is rather simple: each brings along the most stupid person they could find. The person that has discovered the most spectacularly simpleminded is declared the winner.
Tonight, Peter is ecstatic: he has found a rare pearl of dumbness. The ideal retard. “A world-class dummy!” Frankie Pigeon, public servant peon at the Internal Revenue Service. Frankie’s only passions are the models he makes with matches.
But what Peter doesn’t know is that Frankie more than anything else is one of the most unlucky people, and one of the masters in creating catastrophes…. But tonight Peter doesn’t feel that great because he’s thrown out his back. He tries to call the meeting off. But he has no way of contacting Frankie on time, so Frankie will arrive at Peter’s luxurious apartment and, alarmed by Peter’s situation, will decide to stay with Peter and refuse all of his host’s invitations to leave. This is the beginning of a long nightmare for Peter Brochant, in which his entire universe crumbles around him.
The Author’s Underlying Purpose. To show first that the richest and most intelligent people are most of the time not the happiest people alive. They have so many skeletons in their closet that it is sometimes hard to contain them all. Also the superiority complex they constantly carry is sometimes unbearable, especially when they realize that the people whom they consider inferior are most of the time better off being that way in this world. His purpose is therefore rather simple. It is a gentle criticism of today’s society where, even if we believe that class divisions have vanished, they are still very much present.
Problems/Strengths. Strange coincidences are pivotal in this story. Its compression—the entire action taking place in one evening and in one location (Peter Brochant’s apartment)—is both the strength and weakness of this piece. Sometimes this becomes repetitive, and the other characters who interact in the rest of the piece with our two protagonists feel a little hemmed in. Another strength is because it is rather original, especially in America, to see this kind of story applied in that kind of setting. If we were to adapt this story for the screen, its cost would be ridiculously cheap. Isn’t that all we are looking for when writing a short film?
At the end of the story Peter eventually realizes his mistake in misjudging his guest. He will find a new friend in Frankie and reevaluate all of his life in the process. This moral falls inside two of my themes: we find our most sincere friends in the strangest of places and situations, and the idea that several steps must be passed in order to develop one’s own identity. There is a little bit of Peter Brochant in every one of us. No one is open-minded enough.
Louis is understandably taken with the story’s moral purpose—that our first valuations are often founded upon thoughtless prejudice—but he doesn’t say how the all-important steps in Peter’s inner transformation are to become outwardly visible. This story looks difficult to adapt since Peter’s internal changes show only as a gradual relaxation in his tendency to judge others, but the author has since made it into a film whose English title is The Dinner Game (1998, Figure 17–1).1 A story about a change of heart succeeds only if it can show a series of clear behavioral steps. Then its actors have a series of turning points to portray.
Every successful screen narrative—comedy, tragedy, or anything else—depends on being conceptualized as a series of behaviors, each leading to the next like the building blocks in a flow chart. Actions speak louder than words, so the art of adaptation lies in turning a literary work into a flow of visually communicative sequences, each yielding action and visual or aural evidence for the audience to ponder and interpret.
The next stages of development in Louis’s adaptation would be to block out those steps in his main character’s development, and then invent behavioral clues as evidence of the inward changes Peter is experiencing—no easy task.
Figure 17–1 The Dinner Game, in which a group of friends compete to see who can invite the stupidest dinner guest (frame from the film).
Active expectation. Effective drama presents a series of proactive, behavioral building blocks, each causing us to question and hypothesize. This makes us actively speculate, rather than passively witness.
Overview
Both short story examples arrive through the main characters’ minds and perceptions—hardly surprising, since successful short stories capitalize on what literature does best. The corollary is that less worthy literature sometimes makes better adaptation material, especially if it is action-oriented and melodramatic. Jean-Luc Godard reveled in taking plots from the French pulp fiction Serie Noir.
Picking a promising literary property (existing work under consideration for adaptation) requires a rather confident sense of how you could adapt it for the screen. Until hard experience teaches this clarity, you are vulnerable (as
I learned to my cost) to the seduction of language—hardly the worst of fates. Strip good literature of its interior, contemplative qualities, and reduce it to its plot line, and you offend its fans with a travesty of the original. Plenty of television adaptations of the classics fall into this trap.
Of course, Peter’s and Louis’s adaptations might still become first-rate films. Their work is just a first skirmish, and much serious, extended wrangling waits down the road. Never be deterred from any story that you really, really like. Not, anyway, until you have done considerable work at trying to solve the particular problems it presents, which will bring its own fascination and enlightenment.
Notes
1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119038/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl. This story was also the basis for an American film adaption, Dinner for Schmucks (2010).
2Sadly, the film seems only obtainable used and in NTSC format VHS tape. Not even Facets Multimedia (www.facets.org), the largest and most knowledgeable videotheque in North America, carries it.
Going Further
Available at the website www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger are the following additional projects: Assignment 17–2: Adaptation Issues and Assignment 17–3: Dramatic Breakdown.
A short story often contains the kernel of a whole feature film, and sometimes the screen version surpasses the depth of the original. One such is Nicholas Roeg’s mystery Don’t Look Now (1971), taken from a short story by Daphne du Maurier. It is a superb, tight, highly cinematic development of du Maurier’s fascination with spiritualist dimensions beyond death. Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window (1954) came from Cornell Woolrich’s “It Had to Be Murder.” Like all of Hitchcock’s films, it takes on a life all its own. Across the Bridge (1957), on which I was an editing assistant as a youth, came from a Graham Greene story and starred Rod Steiger at the peak of his form playing an Enron-type executive on the run from Interpol.
Here are some books about the adaptation process and an excellent guide to legal issues in filmmaking. The Skaggs volumes are invaluable studies of films made from classic short-story origins. In case I have sounded too negative about subjective short stories, John Korty’s masterly The Music School (1976) came from a five-and-a-half-page story by John Updike, and is set entirely in a man’s mind.2
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. 1957. (A classic that does an excellent job of assessing adaptations of such classics as Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, and Madame Bovary).
Donaldson, Michael and Lisa Calif. Clearance & Copyright 4th Edition: Everything You Need to Know for Film and Television. 2014 (Superb on copyright, acquiring rights, public domain, setting up writing partnerships, and much else besides. For something legal, it is surprisingly readable).
Harrison, Stephanie. Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films. 2005 (Considers many short story to feature film adaptation processes, their difficulties and shortcomings).
Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film. 1992 (Down-to-earth exploration of literature, theatre, and real-life stories as origins for films, with a chapter on that fine two-headed beast, docudrama).
Skaggs, Calvin. The American Short Story Volumes 1 & 2. 1977–1979 (These are the best short story comparative study resources I know. You get critical essays; scripts for the excellent 1970s films made from them in the American Short Story Public Broadcasting Service series; and a great collection of classic short stories by Willa Cather, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, James Thurber, John Updike, and Richard Wright).
18 Ten-Minute, News-Inspired Story
This assignment asks you to use a news story or photo as a starting point and to develop a theme from it. You will take a real event, develop an interesting ten-minute screen idea for a mass audience, and make it express a deeper concern or value you hold. In the process, we will cast aside the rules of good journalism and make a deliberately self-centered use of actuality.
It all starts when a wealthy eccentric lays an arm on your shoulders and offers you a ten-minute exposure on national television. Budget is no object, he says, but you must develop a ten-minute idea for a short, factually derived TV essay, and not worry about objectivity and political balance.
Ten minutes seems short for anything serious, but see what Robert Capa1 can say about war in a single photo (Figure 18–1).
Its subject is a meagerly equipped peasant soldier at the instant of his death when his brains fly from his cranium. Before this moment, he was charging down a stubbly slope with his bayonet fixed toward the enemy; after, he will be just another crumpled body on a rural battlefield. This 100th-of-a-second crisis moment implies several tragic truths, but I will choose just one: in a single irreversible moment, someone precious to family and friends forfeits his life for a belief.2 From this idea, difficult and even terrible issues flow.
Your ten minutes to communicate with an audience is thousands of times longer, so what can you come up with?
Find a real event from your photo or clippings collections that can serve as a vehicle for your questions and values. This need not lead you toward propaganda, since your job is not to preach, but to provoke awareness and questioning in your audience.
Propaganda and drama are different. In propaganda everything serves a foregone conclusion, while drama invites us to share what others must live through, issues that are often complex and even contradictory.
Figure 18–1 Famous photograph, taken during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War, of a soldier at the moment of his death. (Photography by Robert Capa © 2001 by Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos.)
Assignment 18–1: A Moment and Its Consequences
Avoid all conventional intermediaries such as celebrity hosts, introducers, reporters, interviewers, and talking-head interviews.
Step 1: Pick an evocative photo or news story, providing a copy with your assignment.
Step 2: Supply a working hypothesis.
Step 3: Outline your television presentation of ten minutes exploring the event in the picture and its consequences. You might, for instance, imagine the son of Robert Capa’s soldier going over all that his family members lost at that moment.
Step 4: Add brief notes on how your television idea might be covered and presented, and its strengths and weaknesses.
Time, Scale, and Crisis
Many public portals have a set screen time, and television especially so. Here you are allotted ten minutes, and your job is to make optimal use of it. Every story should be appropriate in scale to its likely audience and running time, so the challenge is to be concise, evocative, and moving. Can you say a lot in a little? This is what poetry seeks to do, and the secret lies in developing your central purpose by paring away all that is unnecessary. Begin by defining your story’s apex:
What will your story’s crisis be?
How much or little of the rising action (setup) do you need to get us there?
How much of the falling action (resolution) after the apex will you need to show change and create a sense of closure?
Clearly defining the crisis, and what you need to support its rise and fall, always helps focus and intensify drama. You would be surprised how often writers postpone or avoid doing this.
The Myth of Objectivity
Can you be objective? In fact, no adaptation of fact made by human beings can be, since a tale of any kind is a construct that unavoidably reflects aspects of its creators’ interests, assumptions, and beliefs. Look at old copies of the National Geographic, and marvel at the condescending way that non-white, non-middle-class cultures are depicted by reporters and photographers of the time. They considered themselves scientifically objective and anthropological but produced what now epitomizes the white colonial gaze. Our work will in time merit similar judgments, because we too see through the lens of our own subjective certainties. We must still aspire to fair-mindedness and
relevance to a general audience, so the only antidotes are self-knowledge and critical awareness. Self-questioning while making a working hypothesis will help.
Discussion
How well did the ideas you saw or heard fit into the ten-minute requirement?
Did the hypothesis allude to the necessary expository detail?
Did the film raise worthwhile social or other issues?
Did it leave a satisfying sense of closure by the end?
What belief system did you think emerged from the adaptation?
How cinematic (imaginative visually and in form) was the adaptation?
Notes
1Robert Capa (1913–1954), renowned war photographer.
2An unresolved thirty-year debate continues as to whether Capa staged this photograph. Even if he did (which I don’t believe) the significance of what it represents remains undiminished.
Going Further
Available at the website www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger are the following additional assignments: Assignment 18–2: Reality TV Show; Assignment 18–3: Docudrama; Assignment 18–4: Based on a Real Story …; Assignment 18–5: Behind the Façade; Assignment 18–6: This Far, and No Farther; Assignment 18–7: Analyze Four News Items; and Assignment 18–8: Develop Interpersonal Difference.
Here are book sources to help anyone interested in deriving story ideas from actuality or in exploring the hinterland between documentary and fiction.
Aufderheide, Patricia and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. 2011 (Freedoms you can claim under the fair use doctrine in the digital age).