Format Question

Let's suppose two characters are talking. We go in close on their hands. One character speaks.

Is that line of dialog O.S. (offscreen) to make clear that we're not seeing her talk?

• SALLY (V.O.)
• (holding out the ring)
• Take it. Please.

Or not, because at least part of her is on screen?

• SALLY
• (holding out the ring)
• Take it. Please.

How would you format this, fellow pro monkeys?

UPDATE:

Yeah, yeah, I know. We're not supposed to put in camera direction in scripts.

However, in this case, I'm the narrative director of a video game, and I'm writing a cut-scene that will be pre-rendered. (It'll be generated in the game engine and then treated in various ways.) We need to know how much facial animation we'll have to do, which means I need to write in the camera direction so we can determine whose face is on screen, and for how long. There isn't going to actually be a director as such -- just a narrative director and an animator (plus a game designer and a concept artist, and several programmers and environmental artists).

In a movie script, it occurs to me that (O.S.) is the wrong way to go because a sloppy production manager might think the actor doesn't need to be there.

Handy Writer Tool #33: Color Thesaurus

Ingrid Sundberg has posted a nifty color thesaurus on her Wordpress blog. Here are her colors of red:

ῥοδο-δάκτυλος Ἠώς? Find it here.

Handy, huh?

There are a few misspellings, and a few colors readers might not recognize (admiral blue?). But most of these are quite accessible.

Also handy if you're reading YA novels and you're not quite sure what "teal" looks like. Or if you run across this:

a tl; dr

Check it out.

Two Games Writers Should Play

I've noted before how valuable it is for writers to play poker. Not anything to do with writing, but everything to do with learning how to negotiate. Poker is all about negotiation. Or, negotiation is all about how you play your hand. You can bluff. You can semi-bluff. You can call a bluff. You have to guess what the other guy's reaction to your bet will be.

Tonight, we played Cards Against Humanity. It's a fun game about trigger warnings. (It's billed as "the party game for horrible people.)

One player picks a black card with a phrase ("What ended my last relationship?"). Each other player throws down one of their ten cards to try to come up with the funniest way to fill in the blank. Say one player throws out "unfathomable stupidity." Another might play "kamikaze pilots." A third might play, "Nazis."

So you have to exercise your comedy muscle. And, since you only have ten cards at once, you have to find the clever juxtaposition. "Nazis" is the horrible, funny answer to lots of black cards, though probably not to "Daddy, why is Mommy crying?" So you don't want to use it until you've found a really clever context.

Generally, true connections are not that funny. ("Why is Mommy crying?" "Nazis." Not that funny. "Why is Mommy crying?" "BATMAN!!!" Better.) Better are weird, trangressive connections. But the funniest are weirdly true, transgressive connections. ("What ended my last relationship?" "The Underground Railway.")

This is great practice for writing comedy.

Also, it's a lot of fun.

I wasn't actually playing with fellow writers this time. So I can't guarantee that it's actually fun to play with fellow writers. They are bound to be really funny, but they might take it really seriously. First one to leave the room sobbing hysterically has to buy the whisky next time, I guess.

D-Box and 3D

We saw GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, which was an odd combination of mild goofy humor and an epic save-the-galaxy story. It was in 3D and D-Box. D-Box gives you a seat that vibrates and tilts according to what's going on onscreen.

I've never been a fan of 3D. I feel it doesn't add anything to the experience. I perceive 2D films as 3D. There are a slew of clues aside from stereo perception. Perspective, obviously. Plus objects not in focus are behind or in front of the object in focus. Plus, cinematographers love to slightly fog the atmosphere, so you can always gauge how far something is.

Sound, obviously, added to the film experience in a huge way. Color added important information. 3D adds no information.

But D-Box adds proprioception. As the spaceship arcs in for a landing, your seat actually tilts. When stuff goes boom, your seat vibrates. It's a little bit like being in a 3D motion simulator at a theme park, except much less extreme, of course.

D-Box costs more. In our theatre it added $10 per ticket. And, clever boys, they only fire up the seats you bought tickets for, so no one can sit in a D-Box seat and get the D-Box experience without shelling out.

Lisa thought it was definitely worth it. One of our ongoing questions is, what does seeing a movie in a theater add to the experience? Why shouldn't we just wait for the Blu-Ray? I suspect the main reason the studios keep pushing 3D out there is it's much harder to pirate, and most people don't have 3D on their TV's. D-Box is another reason to go to the theater, and it's currently impossible to pirate.

I doubt I'll be rushing out to see the next D-Box movie. D-Box doesn't make up for a ridiculous rollercoaster plot. I'd rather see a movie with a great story and great dialog. I'd rather see THE AVENGERS in 2D than GUARDIANS in 3D D-Box. But it's worth checking out.

Dominion

Is it fair to review the first five minutes of a TV show? Well, why not?

We had high hopes for DOMINION. It looked cool. And: angels. I haven't seen much in the way of scary angels. Not since the excellent 1995 Christopher Walken B-movie THE PROPHECY, I think. ("You have become evil. And evil is mine.")

Unlike werewolves, vampires and zombies, angels are not seriously overexposed in movies. And there is so much you can do with angel mythology. Full disclosure:  I developed an angel TV series for several years for The Movie Network. I wrote four episodes, I had springboards for nine more, I was in no danger of running out of cool stuff you could do with angels.

So we turn on SyFy's DOMINION series and ... angels are basically flying zombies. In the teaser, the hero (I'm assuming he's the hero -- he looks a lot like Matt Damon) shoots one in the head, drives off, gets attacked by another, plays patty-cake with it, and then it's shot out of the sky by a computerized anti-aircraft gun.

If you can shoot an angel in the head and kill it, I'm going to say, it's a flying zombie.

I haven't seen LEGION, on which DOMINION was based. But I bet the writers had lots of ideas on interesting directions to take the series, even if the movie was this dumb. After all, the reboot of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was a zillion times better than the original. And the original BUFFY: THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie was nowhere near as interesting as the first ten minutes of the TV pilot.

But I can't help thinking the network wanted another WALKING DEAD. So:  flying zombies.

Of course, maybe it gets better. Maybe it gets a lot better. Maybe I should watch episode two. Sometimes pilots are the worst episode of a show, because they get too much input, and there are two many notes asking for everything to be made crystal clear.

But when a series about angels has nothing interesting to add to angel canon... I'm not going to watch it.

There are series that find their legs, or their wings. 30 ROCK didn't really hit its stride until episode 8 or so. If the show had stayed at the level of the pilot, I wouldn't have been a devotee. We really need a phrase that's the reverse of jumping the shark...

If you want to know who we are...

On NPR, a Chinese playwright was talking about going to see a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1885 comic opera THE MIKADO. Her issue was yellow-face. The D'Oyley Carte company was all Caucasians made up to resemble Japanese courtiers:

We don't tolerate blackface performances any more. Not only don't we tolerate Amos'n'Andy style sterotyped Stepin Fetchit blackface, we generally expect that black characters in drama will be played by actors of color. Laurence Olivier could not play Othello these days.

So if we don't tolerate blackface any more, her question was, why tolerate yellowface?

That's an interesting and fraught question. I'd never thought of THE MIKADO making fun of the Japanese. I've thought of it as a parody of Meiji era Japanese mores and culture — arguably a stealth parody of Victorian mores and culture dressed up as a parody of Japanese court culture.

I would be happy to lose Mickey Rooney's horrible bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY's. But THE MIKADO?

No doubt it would be offensive to have European actors in actual yellowface. But from what I can see from Google Images, D'Oyly Carte doesn't seem to put any kind of pseudo-Japanese makeup on its actors. In some performances their actors just look English, in Japanese clothes. In others they're wearing Kabuki makeup. (Whiteface!) Is it still offensive to have Europeans playing nominally Japanese characters, if not made up to look Japanese?

On the other hand: do we really need the kimonos to have the opera? You can dress your singers in sort-of European garb and Kabuki makeup, but still have characters called Nanki-Poo and Pooh-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else. Is that better?

I guess part of the reason I never felt offended personally by THE MIKADO, while I find blackface offensive, is that no oppression is involved. The English were not oppressing the Japanese, especially not Japanese courtiers, in 1885. The Japanese were simply outlandish strangers that everyone wanted to know more about. (W. S. Gilbert conceived the opera after looking at a Japanese sword he'd picked up. Japanese stuff was all the rage in London in the early 1880's.)

But there's still that nagging question. Is it always bad if a white guy plays a non-white guy?
I love LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Alec Guinness is wonderful as King Faisal and Anthony Quinn plays Abu Ben Tayi with great gusto. But they're both white guys playing Bedouin Arabs. (Omar Sharif, at least, was Egyptian.)

They play Bedouins with great respect. But is that enough?

There's a sort of vague consensus in Hollywood that, I think, goes something like this: any Asian can play any Asian. Any brown person can play any other brown person. (I have an Armenian friend who mostly plays Arabs.) Only black people are allowed to play Black people. Only Natives and Inuits can play Natives and Inuits.

And white people can play anyone except Black people. Because all we only have white and Black stars.

It gets confusing at the borders. Is it okay if Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, who was of mixed heritage? Is it okay if Fred Armisen plays Barack Obama, whose mom was white? Some Black people still subscribe to the "one drop" theory: if you have any African heritage, you're black. Jolie got a lot of criticism for playing Mariane Pearl. Halle Berry says she considers her daughter to be black, even though her daughter is mostly of European descent (and, I'm guessing, Halle Berry too). Ironically, "one drop" was a white racist rule from slavery days. Sally Hemings was 3/4 white, but Thomas Jefferson's slave; her children were 7/8 white, but they were still slaves until Jefferson legally freed them.

(Of course, there would be an uproar if you cast a white actress to play Sally Hemings. But it might not be a good artistic choice, anyway. Virginians would have seen her as Black, even if she probably didn't look it.)

I'm not sure how to frame this consistently as a moral issue. I can't think of a logical moral argument why it's okay for an Armenian to play an Arab but a Mexican can't play an American Indian. It would be considered ridiculous for Danish actors to object when Hamlet is performed by Englishmen, or for Italians to complain that Romeo and Juliet makes them look like a bunch of hotheads. As a Jew, I don't feel that the Merchant of Venice should only be played by a Jew.

But there is a sense that it is unseemly for white people to play non-white roles. Especially when there are so few decent ones. 

And maybe there is sort of a calculus of oppression. A Mexican can't play a Native American because we've oppressed the Native Americans so much. 

European ambassadors (black caps) meeting
a Moorish king (white turban), who does not look
like Laurence Fishburne.

To further confuse the issue, some racial casting is based on faulty assumptions. In America, Othello must be played by an African-American. But the Moors were Mediterraneans (Berbers and Arabs), not sub-Saharan Africans. Should Arabs complain when Laurence Fishburne gets to play a Moor?

And of course, every time some white chick plays Cleopatra, Facebook explodes with people complaining that she should be played by an African-American. Cleopatra was Ptolemy, meaning a Greek descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals. We have lots of coins with her face on them.

And then there's Ridley Scott's new movie EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS, where he cast white people in all the leads, and all the villains and servants with Black people. This is wrong both ways. Moses and Ramses were almost certainly not white, but they weren't Black either.

Egyptians riding chariots, attended by Nubians.

The ancient Egyptians probably looked more like modern Coptic Egyptians than like Ethiopians or Southern Sudanese. Ancient Egyptian art makes a clear distinction between Nubians, who are painted in dark pigments, while the Egyptians themselves are painted in reddish pigments.

On the other hand, there are some statues of Ramses that have vaguely African noses.

All of which is to say: I'm confused. I can understand how a Japanese person could feel insulted by THE MIKADO. But I hope she wouldn't be. And I think it's a bit of a stretch for a Chinese person to be insulted by THE MIKADO. But then, I'm not an Asian person watching THE MIKADO. One of the best definitions of privilege that I've heard is "when you don't think something is a problem, because it's not a problem for you."

Is there any valid criterion, other than "this feels uncomfortably racist, and that is just silly"? I can't stand Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S and I'm not going to rent SONG OF THE SOUTH. But LAWRENCE feels okay. And I'd really hate to lose "I am so proud." Why do I draw the lines here and there? Should I draw them somewhere else?

All I can say is:  I hope we get to the point where it no longer matters. In Shakespeare's day, Italians and Danes really were foreigners. One day, maybe no one will feel insulted by THE MIKADO because they don't feel that the show is in any way directed at them, and they can enjoy the three little maids who, all unwary, come from a ladies' seminary.

What do you think?

Next post:  I babble on about the Ukrainian crisis. 

iOS

I've been playing a couple of neat iOS games.

UsTwo's Monument Valley is a beautiful puzzle platformer inspired by the works of M. C. Escher. The world is full of impossible 3D objects; you can rotate and slide some bits of them. The clever idea is that if something looks like you can walk across it, then you can walk across it. So if something is impassible at one angle, you turn it until it looks passible. And then it is.

For example, you need to get the princess up to that button there (SPOILER):

Which means you'll have to get her on top of that yellow totem. But how? She can't climb.

But suppose you put the totem there. It's just a trick of perspective that the top of the totem looks like it's level with that pillar on the left there.

So it's snap to get on the totem now...

And then you can get to the button. 

Crazy, huh?

It's also beautiful in a minimalist way. Lisa, who never plays games, tried a level, and decided she better not continue, or she'd fall into it.

It is a short experience -- maybe 3 hours? And there's not a lot of replayability. But for $3.99, it's terrific.

Meanwhile, DragonBox has a new game. They did a lovely job with DragonBox Algebra, which teaches your five-year-old to do algebra. Elements is teaching my 10-year-old to solve geometric proofs. How do you prove that square is square?



Both of these games try to do one thing, and do it super well. They are fun and elegant at the same time.

It's funny, but though I'm a narrative designer, I don't necessarily need a story. Elegant gameplay does it for me, too.

Even if you don't have a kid, you might dig these. If you have a kid, I think you'll definitely dig these.

Mauricio Fernandes Interviews Me

Friend of the Blog Mauricio Fernandes interviewed me for his blog. Since he translated me into Portuguese, I reprint it here, in English.

Oh, by the way, sorry about the World Cup, Mauricio...

Q. If you could pick just one, what would it be: Character, Plot or Theme? (an unfair question, but it is good to know the focus of the writer)

Of course a great movie has all of them, but: plot. You can have a successful movie without a theme. (What was the theme of HARD DAY’S NIGHT? Unless it was, “Aren’t the Beatles fun?”) You can have a hit movie without strong characters (TRANSFORMERS). You can't have a successful movie without a plot. Except in France.

By "successful movie," I mean butts in seats, not critical success.

I’m sure people can come up with counter-examples. I prefer to use the word “story” rather than “plot.” Story includes the main character(s). You need a story. (Except in France.) I start from the story, and work my way into the characters. I think most pro screenwriters do, too.

Q. An American or Canadian movie to be read, re-read and studied.

I'd cite ALL THAT JAZZ and ANNIE HALL. Both of them tell difficult, complex stories, yet you're never lost, and you always have an emotional reaction to what's going on.

Q. A foreign movie to be read, re-read and studied.

DAY FOR NIGHT made me want to go into the film business. However, I was 20, and I figured I was too old. Seven years later, I went into the film business.

Q. For you, writing a scene, what´s the most frequent thing to arise: an image, a dialog or an action? In your opinion, is there a hierarchy?

I'm more structural. Who wants what? Why can't they get it? Why should I care? (= David Mamet’s crystallization of the 3 questions of drama.)

I try to figure out what the characters are trying to get from each other, and why they won't give each other what the other person wants.

I write the scene long, and then I trim down to the minimum. Get in late, get out early. Leave'em wanting more.

Q. What were the maximum number of drafts that you wrote for a screenplay? What was the problem with it?

"Drafts" is kind of a meaningless concept on a computer. Writers talk about doing a "pass," but sometimes I just do a surgical intervention to address a specific note. I might only look at the scenes involving a certain character. Is that a "draft"?

I consider all drafts a first draft. Except the shooting draft. I mean, suppose you've done 20 drafts, and then you realize the main character should be a woman? Or the hero is really a villain? Do you not do the change because you have a 20th draft? Of course not. You have to always be willing to throw out as much of the script as you have to in order to make it better. Sometimes you have to write 20 drafts in order to realize that you have a horrible structural flaw.

And by "structure," I don't mean act structure -- I mean story structure. A story is

(a) a character we care about (b) with an opportunity, problem or goal (c) who faces obstacles, an antagonist and/or his or her own personal flaw (d) who has something to lose (jeopardy) (e) and something to gain (stakes).

Any time you realize how you can strengthen one of those, it's time for a new draft. Or pass. Or whatever.

I rewrote a script of mine from 2006, when I optioned it to Cirrus, to 2013, when they finally decided not to do it. How many drafts? Who cares?

On the other hand my total intervention on BON COP / BAD COP was five weeks. I came in on the end of pre-production, and shortly after I rewrote it, they shot it.

Q. When you have a writer´s block, what do you do?

I think professional writers don't have the luxury of writer's block. Do cabinetmakers have "cabinetmaker's block"? Screenwriters are craftspeople, not "artistes." (Except, possibly, Charlie Kaufman.)

Shakespeare was writing to deadline, for a rep company. He had to put in stuff for his actors to do. The Gravedigger is probably in Hamlet so he’d have something for Will Kemp to play. Turned out pretty good.

About 40% of the way into any script, I usually hit The Sucky Point. That's when everything sucks. I don’t stop writing. I keep writing until I have a script, and then go back and look at it. It's never as sucky as I thought, and I can start trimming and restructuring, which is less nerve wracking since I'm almost always making the script better.

However, pro writers use tools. For example, one tool is to go back to the structure. What is the opportunity, problem or goal? How can I put the hero in a situation where his flaw gets in his way?

Sometimes when a script isn't working I take the whole thing back down to index cards and rebreak the story.

Or take it back to the one-line pitch. What goods do I have to deliver? What's a scene the audience really wants to see, given the one-line pitch?

Whenever Raymond Chandler didn't know what to write next, he had someone bust in the door with a gun. Then he'd figure out who the guy was and why he was there.

Q. Do you have someone who reads what you write before everyone and in whose opinion you trust? If yes, who´s it and why did you choose him (or her)?

My wife is a writer. I chose her because I have been madly in love with her since we were kids. However, she is also a superb writer. She has a very different perspective on the world, and she is also a very different writer. She has more of a talent for coming up with weird and fresh new things, while I'm more Structure Guy. We discuss almost everything and read almost everything the other person does, regardless whose name is on the script.

My first wife wasn't a writer, but she had a lot of input on everything I've done.

I had a co-creator and writing partner on NAKED JOSH, my TV show. She, too, was better at coming up with ideas and maybe I was better at judging and shaping them. It was a good creative relationship and a nightmarish interpersonal relationship. At its worst, a writing partnership can be like a toxic marriage, without the sex.

Q. Do you have the habit of doing research? In what consists your research?

I don't usually do a lot of research, except when my story provokes me to go look something up. However, I read a lot, so I'm already carrying around huge amounts of utterly useless information which sometimes turns out to be useful. For example, I’ve been carrying around the formula for bronze for decades, and finally got to put it in something I was writing.

Q. How many time (weeks, months, years) do you take to have a final draft of a screenplay? If depends on the screenplay, please give me one example.

How long is a piece of string?

The only thing I can put a time limit on is the amount of time it takes to write a first draft feature screenplay. That's usually about three weeks. But the outline takes as long as it takes, and the rewriting takes as long as it takes. The best answer I can give you is: much, much longer than you think when you're writing it the first time.

However, there's a lot of fallow time in there. I wrote KIKI WILDER from 2006 to 2013, but that was only one of dozens of scripts, pitches, outlines, treatments, and games that I wrote in there. You learn a lot when you look at something you haven't seen in months.

I don't recommend rewriting only one thing endlessly. Write something, go write something else, come back to the first thing. Your first idea may not be your best. I hear about people who've been writing the same script for years, and I can't understand that impulse. Is that the only thing you have to say? Really?

As an exercise, take a script you've been writing for a while, put it on the shelf, don't look at it, and one month later, rewrite the outline from memory. Compare. The new version will be better: more streamlined, more memorable. That's because anything that wasn't memorable, you don't remember.

Q. What are the best traits for a screenwriter? And the worst?

The best trait for a screenwriter is the inability to go more than a few days without writing. For most of us, it's a jones. An addiction. I just don't like myself if I'm not writing something. Writers write. If someone says they "want to write, but just don't have a lot of time for it," I’m not sure they’re a writer.

The worst trait is the inability to finish. You have to finish things.

Q. What´s the best "school" for a screenwriter? What was your "school"?

Showbiz. I don't recommend school. I recommend writing stuff and getting it out there. You need feedback from people in the biz.

Writing groups are good.

I haven't had a really great writing teacher for me. I've had teachers who were terrific writers, at least one of them Oscar-nominated, but I haven't had terrifically enlightening writing teachers. Maybe they were good for other students, I don’t know.

However, I did learn a hell of a lot about writing from an editing teacher, Oscar-nominated Richard Marks, and from an acting teacher, Joanne Baron. And from an African-American Studies professor at Yale, Robert Farris Thompson. I would say you learn the most from people in adjacent disciplines.

Q. If you could cite just one book about screenwriting, what will it be?

Well, that's a gimme, since I wrote one! CRAFTY SCREENWRITING: WRITING MOVIES THAT GET MADE!