Save the Cat! Strikes Back: More Trouble For... (12 page)

“Story is a puzzle. And getting all the pieces to fit just right… is the point of the job.”

As much as I enjoy teaching classes and responding to your email, one of the most delightful experiences I've had since writing
Save the Cat!
is working with you one-on-one. Though I have written or co-written 78 scripts, there is nothing I like more than reading and reviewing your screenplay — primarily due to one simple fact:

It's not my script!

Yes, just like in class, as I so pleasantly rip your Fun and Games to shreds, or bluntly say “No, that doesn't work,” or smile while you are seemingly lost, it's so much easier to see a problem when I'm not emotionally involved. But whether it's me, or the writers in your writing group, or your agent, or a civilian with no vested interest, someone has to read your screenplay. Bringing your idea to its final form is perilous, but a must.

It's like
The Wages of Fear
. Ever see this? French film. Two truck drivers have to deliver a load of nitroglycerin — very slowly — through an obstacle course of rope bridges and quicksand. And they're French, so there's all that Gauloises smoke.

Well that's us, minus the Turkish cigarettes hopefully, assigned to transport this wonderful little flicker of inspiration across the finish line by extrapolating just the right story from it. Yet the highway is riddled with warnings of what happens when we fail to heed the laws of sound storytelling.

One of the movies I mentioned earlier as a great example of a title that grabs us is
Snakes on a Plane
. Yes, great title, great concept! But I bet even those connected with the film feel they never quite delivered on the promise of the premise.

Booooooom!

It just shows what can happen.

A great title and logline are vital, for without attracting attention to our story with a concept that grabs us, we will not get the chance we deserve to have our screenplay bought and made. But we still have to
ex-e-cute
. And that means nailing down the
sto-ry
.

And that means checking out something called “the spine.”

What is the so-called
spine of the story
?

That's simple. The spine is how we track what happens to the hero or heroes from the beginning to the end. It's that thing we follow, the rail we keep tabs on with our toe in the dark, as we watch a hero we love, or at least understand, grow and change.

And that change must be big!

Heroes start off one way and end up another. In the comedy
Liar Liar
, Jim Carrey is a liar when we start that movie and by the end he's not. What happened? The spine of the story shows Jim's “milestones of growth” as he goes from one polar extreme to its opposite. And the bigger the change for any hero, the better.

The problem for us is that anything that doesn't add to the spine, doesn't belong. And that's when the trouble starts.

Great stories come about only with a lot of banging away on the story spine to make sure it's straight — and stays straight — because the temptation to veer off the path is tremendous. We're writers! We
are lured away by flashes of light in the bushes that take us off the road and into the brambles. And the harder we try to incorporate these misadventures — the more we justify mistakes and convince ourselves inspiration trumps all — the faster we find ourselves with
story scoliosis
, a crooked spine of a tale chock full of half-steps, missteps, off-ramps, U-turns, and curlicues.

And that's when you come to me.

I love working with writers, and I love pounding on your spine to make sure it's straight. I have objectivity. So when I say your whole Act One has gotta go because it doesn't set up what the hero learns by the end, you think: “What are you,
insane!
? You mean that part I slaved over for two months, and even got the punctuation marks in the right places?”

That's right. Gone-o.

Or when I tell you your Opening Image is wrong, you are dumbfounded. That's the initial scene you think is
soooooooooo
brilliant because it matches up with the Final Image perfectly. So you say: “That's stupid,
you're
stupid. You don't get it!”

And I have to tell you something that may sound odd:

You're better than this!

You're clinging to stuff not because it's brilliant but because you think, secretly, you can't come up with something else. Deep down you protect these scenes and images because you think they're your best work, and you can't do it any better.

Well, I'm saying you can.

You can come up with a hundred better Opening Images.

You can write a brand spanking new Act One.

In your sleep.

As long as you stick to the one job that is the one thing any one really cares about: telling a story with a spine.

And cutting out anything that doesn't service that mission.

One of the first things to figure out in any story, and one of the fastest ways to get taken off the rails if we don't, is to discover
whom
this is about. When you give me your script and I have a problem with it, this is the first question I usually ask:

Who's the hero?

Because what I'm really asking is: Are you sure?

In class, I talk about this as it relates to my script,
Granny
. Ask anyone; this is a screenplay I'd been working on for years. I had 10 drafts of
Granny
that did not sell. And one of the reasons it didn't was… I had the wrong hero.

Granny
, you'll recall, is the story of a senior serial killer who arrives on a family's doorstep claiming to be the recently dead wife's mother, and here's the scene: It's a dark and stormy night. (Sorry) There's a knock at the door. Standing there is a sweet old lady (and recent escapee from St. Vitus Center for the Criminally Insane). Who answers the door? Dad. Because in the early drafts, Dad was the hero. The story was about the head of the house, wife dead, children out of control, who needs lots of help.

So when Granny shows up, he says
come on in!

Well, for target market reasons, that was really a bad idea. Men over 40 don't see these slasher flicks; teenagers do!

So how does the scene play now?

Same dark and stormy night. Same stranger on the stoop.

But now it's Amber, the 16-year-old, who answers the door.

Now it's her story. And that's the draft that sold.

You may have different problems finding your hero that aren't related to figuring out the target market. Sometimes, there are two people we need to track, so whom are we tracking most? Take
Lethal Weapon
. Like most buddy movies, this is what we call a “two-hander” because both Danny Glover and Mel Gibson change. But the way to find the spine is to see it as Danny's story; he's the one with the case, and the problem — and he's the one who'll be most affected by his time spent with suicidal Mel.

There are also films with three heroes. Examples of expertise in dealing with these can be found in the work of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who apparently like this dynamic. Check out
Aladdin
, then compare and contrast with the first
Pirates of the Caribbean
and realize these are both brilliant examples of a “three-hander.” But Terry will tell you while
Aladdin
is the title character's movie,
Pirates
is really Keira Knightley's story; that's how they charted the spine. By zeroing in on one hero, and tracking events through her, these two screenwriting greats got a handle on “Who's the hero?” — and as a result found their spine.

But the fun doesn't end there.

If yours is an ensemble piece, like
Crash
or
Babel
, who's the hero then? Well in those cases, it's several people with several story arcs. But we still have to find the spine — and that is found in the
issue
of each movie.
Crash
is about isolation.
Babel
is about global interconnectedness. And each has an “entry-point character” (Don Cheadle in
Crash
, Brad Pitt in
Babel
) who's “us” and who, slightly above the fray, has his eyes opened the most.

If you're having a hard time finding your hero, try this handy guide to figuring out who it is, and whose story you must follow as he goes from beginning to end. The hero is the one who:

► is most like “us”

► has the biggest “arc”

► learns the greatest lesson

► least wants to change, yet…

► has the most need to do so

And the only reason to figure this out is so we can keep our story spine straight. Knowing the “who” tells us how to demarcate the “milestones of growth” and the change the hero makes from beginning to end.

So how do we show that change?

How you show the change is by asking,
What's the problem?
This is the second question I pose to struggling writers about their scripts, after we've established whom their movie concerns. A hero has to have a problem that this movie will fix, so if your movie doesn't start out with a hero and a world with problems, I see it. But you don't.
Yet!
So I am usually smiling — evilly — when I ask:

Why is having no problem a problem?

The short answer is: If there's no problem, you have nowhere to go. If there's nothing wrong, why take this trip?

Keep in mind my most brilliant piece of advice to writers and the thing that brings us all back to square one — and back down to earth: Any story you tell is about “the most important event that ever happened to the hero of that story.” It is the most life-altering, most paradigm-shifting, most enlightening or crucial episode — and
this
story causes that change to occur. The problems we set these heroes up with, and resolve in the course of the tale, trump all. Forget all the car crashes, and the set pieces, and the Fun and Games that have drawn us to see this movie; they are only in the service of transforming the hero.

And us.

If you don't see this as your spine; if, at base, you aren't tracking this change, and showing how the change occurs from scene to scene, you will not have a story that matters.

There, I said it!

And let me tell you, it feels good to get it off my chest!

If this declaration is true, and you have every reason to believe it is, then figuring out “the problem” is how you will track “the transformation.” If someone is going from Point A to Point B, then you must start your hero off with a problem that's so big and so all-encompassing, it makes the trip worthwhile.

And if not, you have to make it so.

You'll note in the first chapter, when dealing with the logline for
Quickie
— about the banker who goes to Las Vegas and wakes up
with a penniless waitress (yay Vegas!) — when breaking down that story we must be able to see more than its poster, we have to see what the movie's “about.” And guess what? It's not about the hero's bender, or his job, or his boss; it's the fact he's about to marry the wrong girl. The way to make that point clearer is to show us up front that our hero's soon-to-be future-altering choice will lead to a dead end in all aspects of his life. Yet while even that is true, it's
still
not the problem.

The problem is: Our hero doesn't know it!

And the story spine will track how our hero figures it out.

Stories are about problem solving, and the slow coming to consciousness by our hero that he a) has a deficit and b) needs to fix it. If you don't have a hero with a problem, find one — and make it clear. The bigger the problem, the stronger the spine.

In the three loglines pitched in that first chapter, we can see who the hero is in each, but “what's the problem?” One way to solve broken concepts like these is to ask this question, and be ready to change the concept entirely when we find the answer.

► In
Quickie
, the problem is our hero's marriage will lead to a dead-end life; thus, the spine should track how he discovers this and gives up his old ways to embrace the new. And now maybe it's better to describe the waitress he marries as “vivacious” rather than “penniless.” That simple adjective switch suddenly makes me see where this might go.

► In
Partly Cloudy
, according to the logline, the problem is our TV weatherman is bored, but really it's a story about a coward: A passive man wants to be a hero. That's the “problem” we'll track. So now maybe he should be “on the verge of” hurricane season, and we need to “set up” the idea that saving his town is part of the Act Three finale.

► In
Dark Streets
, the problem is he's a down-and-out cop, full of existential angst about his job — and his life, who will learn
life's real meaning as he actively solves the mystery. And if the writer can give up “hiding the ball” and tell us this, the real drama might come out!

But it all comes back to finding “the problem.”