Save the Cat! (21 page)

And whether you've got 90 pages or 130, you've accomplished what you set out to do: You've written a draft of a movie.

You are amazing!

So before going on any further, let's bask for a moment in the glory of your success.

Finishing a screenplay separates you from five out of
IO
would-be screenwriters who only talk about writing their movie ideas. You have increased your odds of success immeasurably by doing the work. And whether it's your first script or your twenty-first, you have one more notch on your belt in a never-ending shootout with your creative demons. You've not only written a screenplay, you've gotten better at the job, and each one you write makes you better still.

Me? I've written or co-written 75 screenplays, including TV scripts, and when I compare the ones I wrote initially to the ones I'm writing now, I can see real growth in my skills. I can always get better at this. And as long as I maintain the attitude that the next script will be my best yet, and keep being excited about the process, I know I can't fail.

But back to you. You've finished! And yet even though you're a proud parent, you're starting to have a few nagging doubts about this creation of yours. Some parts of your script don't work, you know that. And some parts, you think secretly, might be a train wreck. But having put your script aside for about a week, which I recommend (longer if you can stand it), you now come back to that glorious hatchling, read it over from start to finish... and are suddenly struck dumb.

It's awful!!!

Characters are flat! Nothing happens or happens so slowly you can't believe a human being wrote it and not some mental patient. What were you thinking? You're not
done
! You haven't even started! What's worse, now that you know the awful truth, now that you realize how bad you are at this, you don't even want to keep going. You've gone from the high of mountaintop megalomania to the depths of self-loathing.

Am I getting the basic roller-coaster ride?

Well, fear not. It always happens. You've got a ways to go. But before you jump off the Hollywood sign, take a breath. There's a way to prop up this puppy again and get you back on your megalomaniac way.

I can help you pinpoint and fix some of your rough spots.

And it's really not all that hard.

It's just a matter of being honest in your assessment and willing to do the work to fix all the problems. So, here are typical trouble spots that others have faced, long before you came along, that may help in your rewrite.

THE HERO LEADS

A common mistake in a lot of rough drafts is the problem of the
inactive hero.
It's often hard to spot, especially if you've done everything else right. You've gone out of your way to thoroughly plot your screenplay; every beat moves the story forward. But somehow you forgot to inform your lead.

Your hero is being
dragged
through the story, showing up when he's supposed to but for no reason. Your hero seems unmotivated, his goal vague, the driving force that should be guiding him is MIA. Imagine what it would be like if a detective in a murder mystery acted this way. We'll call him Johnny Entropy because he's an existential layabout who has no motivation and can't be paid to care. Johnny shows up, he goes through the motions of the case but he doesn't want to. He never seeks clues, they're just given to him. He has no goals. He exists but he doesn't know why. Johnny's motto is: "What's the point? We're all gonna die some day anyway. "

Does this describe your hero?

Well if so, you've got to fix it, because if there's one thing we know for sure it's the truism that:
The hero must be proactive.
It's The Law. If he's not, he's not a hero.

Here's a checklist to see if your lead needs more oomph:

1. Is your hero's goal clearly stated in the set-up?
Is what your hero wants obvious to you and to the audience? If not, or if you don't know what your hero's goal is, figure it out. And make sure that goal is spoken aloud and restated in action and words throughout the story.

2.
Do clues of what to do next just come to your hero or does he seek them out?
If it all happens too easily for your hero, something's wrong. Your hero cannot be handed his destiny, he must work for it at every step.

3.
Is your hero active or passive?
If the latter, you have a problem. Everything your hero does has to spring from his burning desire and his deeply held need to achieve his goal. If he can't be bothered, or can get to that burning desire manana, you've got
Hamlet
— fine if you're Shakespeare, bad if you're writing for Vin Diesel.

4. Do other characters tell your hero what to do or does he tell them?
Here's a great rule of thumb: A hero never asks questions! The hero knows and others around him look to
him
for answers, not the other way around. If you see a lot of question marks in your hero's dialogue, there's a problem. The hero knows; he never asks.

My guess is that if any of the above rings true, you have an inactive hero on your hands. And scripts with inactive heroes lay there like a lox. So fix it! Give your hero a little kick in the butt and tell him to get in the game. Come on, let's see some leadership! That's what heroes do.

TALKING
THE PLOT

Another problem found in poorly executed screenplays is "talking the plot," and it's a dead giveaway that the writer is green. Characters will walk into scenes and say, "Well, you're my sister, you should know! " and "This sure isn't like the time I was the star fullback for the N.Y. Giants until my... accident." This kind of dialogue is... (say it with me)
bad!
And yet I completely understand why it's in there.

You have backstory and plot to explain, and there's no way to say it, so you resort to having your characters say it for you. And it sucks. It's one of those Guaranteed-to-Have-Your-Script-Thrown-Across-the-Room-by-the-Reader things.

The reason it makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up is that it's unreal. Who talks like that? You've forgotten that your characters don't serve you, they serve themselves. They should walk into each scene with their own goals and say what's on their minds, not yours. You must reveal who they are and what they want, their hopes, dreams, and fears, by
how
they say it as much as
what
they say. Good dialogue tells us more about what's going on in its
subtext
than on its surface. Subtle is better. And talking the plot is like using a sledgehammer. It's overkill.

An adjunct to this rule of bad dialogue is "Show, Don't Tell," another of the most frequent mistakes found in newbie screenplays. You can say more about a relationship in trouble by seeing a husband eye a pretty young thing as he and his wife are walking down the street than by three pages of dialogue about how their marriage counseling sessions are going. Movies are stories told in pictures. So why would you resort to telling us when you can show us? It's so much more economical! You want to make sure the audience knows about a guy's N.Y. Giants past? Show team pictures on the wall of his apartment, give him a limp (from the accident
that ended his career, but only if it's germane), sneak it in with subtle references. Want to make sure we know a fight has occurred between two people? Have them talk about anything
but
the fight. If handled right, the audience will get it. They're a lot more perceptive than you think.

By showing and not telling, you leave room for your characters to be at their best — that's being active, with their own separate agendas for being there, not yours.

The truth is that movies are so much about what happens that we must learn about characters by what they do, not by what they say. As in Life, character is revealed by action taken, not by words spoken. And in a good movie, information doesn't come out in dialogue, it comes out in the verve and forward motion of the story. You must get out all your wonderful plot and backstory on the fly, or better yet, not at all. You should be more concerned with what's happening now than what happened before the story started. So when you feel yourself drifting into talking the plot, don't. And when you think you're talking too much: Show, don't tell.

MAKE THE BAD GUY BADDER

An addition to the idea that The Hero Leads is the rule that says: The bad guy must be as bad as possible. Many times, your hero will do everything he's supposed to. He'll be proactive; he'll seek out and overcome obstacles; he'll do amazing things — and still we're unimpressed. He's such a nobody! He's so average, so unheroic, so insignificant! We don't want to see nobodies onscreen, we want to see heroes.

If this seems familiar, then maybe it's not the hero but his antagonist that's the problem, and there's an easy solution. Maybe you need to make the bad guy... badder!

This is a common first-draft problem. I think it's because we want our hero to win so badly that we don't want to make it impossible for him to do so. But we cannot protect our hero from danger and challenge; we must throw a little more at him than he is able to take. And making the bad guy badder automatically makes the hero bigger. It's one of those Immutable Laws of Screenwriting.

Think about James Bond. What makes James Bond a super spy isn't the gadgets or the girls or the car. What makes him James Bond is Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Dr. No. How dull would 007 be if his enemy was an evil accountant who was juggling the books down at the local bank. Where would the challenge be in that? Suddenly the gadgets and the car and the charm aren't necessary. James can just do a quick skip-trace on the Internet and be done in time for Martini Hour. He needs someone bigger to play with to make his own heroism bigger. He needs an antagonist whose powers match his own.

In many a well-told movie, the hero and the bad guy are very often two halves of the same person struggling for supremacy, and for that reason are almost equal in power and ability. How many movies can you name that have a hero and a bad guy who are two halves of the same persona? Think about
Batman
(Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson),
Die Hard
(Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman), and even
Pretty Woman
(Richard Gere and Jason Alexander). Aren't the hero and the bad guy of each of these movies the light and dark sides of the same person? Aren't they the positive and negative x-ray of one soul? And each has something the other wants — even if it's just an answer to what makes them the way they are.

The point is that the hero and the bad guy are a matched set and should be of equal skill and strength, with the bad guy being just slightly more powerful than the hero because he is willing to go to any lengths to win. After all, the bad guy has given up on having

"family values" by definition. This does not mean you make the bad guy impossible to beat —just a challenge that
looks
impossible. So if your hero and your bad guy are not of equal strength, make them so, but give the edge to the bad guy. By ratcheting up the power and invincibility of the bad guy, the hero will have to do more that we can admire. Making the bad guy just out of reach of the ability of the hero to defeat him elevates our hero.

TURN,TURN, TURN

This is another of those slogans that I have written on a faded Post-it '
¹
note. It's been stuck above my desk for 20 years. It was the first piece of wisdom I ever heard about screenwriting and I'll be damned if I know who told me.

But this anonymous advisor has guided me ever since.

The basis of the "Turn, Turn, Turn" rule is: The plot doesn't just move ahead, it spins and intensifies as it goes. It is the difference between velocity (a constant speed) and acceleration (an increasing speed). And the rule is: It's not enough for the plot to go forward, it must go forward faster, and with more complexity, to the climax.

If things happen in your movie but aren't interesting, then all you've got is a chase. They go here, they go there, but nothing about the chase provokes any activity behind the audience's eyeballs. We're just watching stuff happen, but nothing about it is engaging or humanly compelling.

And that's... (Anybody? Anybody?)... bad. Right.

Let's take, for example, a very loud and busy movie,
The Cat in the Hat,
starring Mike Meyers. Apart from the fact that it's one of the more inappropriate kids' movies ever made, it's a great example of

lots of STUFF! happening, all over the place, TONS! of action... without anything
happening
at all. It's kinetic eye candy with no forward motion. It's a CHASE! with no stakes. They go here, they go there, but I don't give a damn and don't know why I'm watching. It proves the point that you can have lots of action and still not have a story. It moves forward, but there's no Turn, Turn, Turn.

More must be revealed along every step of the plot about your characters and what all this action means. To that end, you, the writer of this plot, must show how it affects your characters as you go along. You must show flaws, reveal treacheries, doubts, and fears
of
the heroes — and threats
to
them. You must expose hidden powers, untapped resources, and dark motivations for the bad guys that the hero doesn't know about. Show facets of that spinning diamond of plot, let the reflected light amaze the audience. The diamond cannot merely move across the screen, it must Turn, Turn, Turn in order to truly dazzle us. Show us all of it. Let the light play off its many sides; let's see some of that detail!