MAGNIFICATION
by William C. Martell
A great movie begins with a great idea. Who would want to see a well crafted screenplay about a boring subject? You can have the greatest dialogue, most fantastic scenes, and amazing characters of any film ever made... but the audience won't know that until AFTER they've paid their $9 and stood in line for two hours. How do you convince them to pay the $9 and stand in line in the first place? All you have is a poster and a trailer... both can't do much more than give you the basic idea behind the film. If you can't get millions of people to stand in line on the opening weekend to see the IDEA your script is DOA. Is the idea behind your script juicy enough to get people to line up BEFORE they've seen the film?
Wait - shouldn't we be writing stories that we are passionate about? Stories that we care about? Shouldn't we be writing from the heart? Of course you should - if you don't care about the story how do you expect the audience to care about the story?
How can you write about something that is deeply personal AND that 600-800 million people worldwide will pay to see? Isn't that a contradiction? Nope - that's our job! To do both. To come up with an idea that is not only deeply personal, but is also mass entertainment. How do you do that? The best way is through a tool called Magnification. Magnification is a tool that takes the basic story and raises the stakes. Magnification takes an emotion or problem that we've all experienced, and exaggerates it all out of proportion.
PERSONAL STORIES
What do you care ABOUT? What makes you angry? What stirs your passions? What makes you emotional? That's going to be the core of what you write about. Start with that thing that gets you fired up, then craft a story around it. Find a protagonist that has to deal with that problem. Because it's a movie and not reality, make sure that this is the worst case of that thing that gets you fired up that ever was.
I was having coffee with a couple of friends yesterday, and one of them was mad as hell at her HMO - they had lost her records so when she showed up for an appointment (after taking the day off from work without pay) they told her they couldn't see her - could she come back two weeks from Wednesday? Well, she made a doctor's appointment because she's in pain NOW.
Okay - HMOs are impersonal. Medical insurance companies don't pay for all treatments, and make you jump through hoops for the stuff they do pay for. Industrialized medicine cares more about the bottom line than the patients. Let's use that to create our story. Because we're making a movie, we need to make sure our story is about the worst thing that can happen - we're going to magnify the story into a life or death situation.
Let's say your child needs an operation - but that operation isn't covered by your medical insurance. Your child will DIE if he doesn't get this operation! What would you do? Let your child die? We've just taken a small, personal problem that we can all understand - how HMOs and medial insurance companies don't seem to care about people - and magnified it into a life or death situations where a child might die. We have taken one of life's small frustrations and turned it into a problem big enough to fill the screen. Do you let your child die? Or grab a gun and demand that the doctors perform the operation whether your insurance covers it or not. When we magnify the problem, everything else becomes larger as well... and more exciting.
Now let's make it even worse... Because you are holding people at gunpoint, the police send in a SWAT team. Now let's create a moral decision (because if your hero is 100% right, you have a dull story): Would you kill someone so that your child can live? If one of those SWAT cops aims at you, will you put down his gun... or start a shoot out so that your child will get the operation? I think that's a fairly exciting scenario. You're still going to debate the impersonalization of health care, but you have magnified the situation into a tense hostage situation.
You may recognize this as JOHN Q which opens Friday and stars Denzel Washington as the father who holds a hospital hostage so that his son can get the operation that isn't covered by his medical insurance. I'll bet my friend could have written this script - she was mad enough to kill yesterday, so writing it would have been therapy. She could have been telling an intensely personal story, but magnified it into the kind of big dramatic situation that would attract a star like Denzel Washington... and an audience eager to find out how it all ends.
If you don't care about your story, it's going to be hard to stick with it for 110 pages. If you aren't emotionally involved in the story, it's hard to imagine 600-800 million people around the world caring enough to pay to see it. But you need to magnify that story into an exciting idea that will attract those 600-800 million people in the first place. You need to use your creativity to magnify that problem you care about into a movie idea.
But anyone could come up with JOHN Q - even though it's a life or death situation, it's a fairly normal idea. I'll see the movie because Denzel stars, so I know it will be an "acting-fest", but it's not the kind of movie that would instantly attract an audience based on the idea alone. The idea is just too tame. But what if the story were about androids dealing with their warranty? What if the "lifetime warranty" is for the life of the human owner, not the lifetime of the android? Or what if.... Heck, there are a million ideas - just grab one. Make sure it's the kind of idea that's amazing on its own. Make sure when you tell people the idea they look at you and say "Where the hell did THAT come from?" (then wish THEY had thought of it).
You need to have a wild idea... that you are passionate about.
MORE MAGNIFICATION
I have this story that, well, let's say it happened to somebody I know. I'm going to change the names to protect the guilty. There are these two guys, Ed and Fred. They're college roommates and best friends. When Ed finds a girlfriend (let's call her Mercy) at first Fred is jealous. Then Fred realizes he has the hots for Mercy... how to get Ed out of the picture?
One day when Ed's going to blow a week's pay to take Mercy out on the town, Fred tells Ed they're out of beer... would Ed go to the 7-11 and pick up a six pack? Ed goes to get the beer. Mercy shows up for their date, and Fred says that Ed went out with some other girl and left it to Fred to break the news to her... when Mercy breaks down in tears, thoughtful Fred jumps her bones. Ed comes back from the 7-11 with a six pack of beer and finds his best friend screwing his girlfriend! Ed is mad as hell!
Hey, that's a really emotional story. Made me mad just typing it. I hate both of them... Oops, I mean, Ed hates both of them. I thought Fred was my best friend, I though Mercy loved me... er, I mean, loved Ed. That was years ago and Fred is still mad about it - that was the pivotal moment in his life! Everything Fred is today is because of that day! He doesn't trust anybody, and his master plan is to become a rich screenwriter and make Fred & Mercy grovel before me... er, I mean, him.
Okay - do you think I could get 600-800 million people to pay to see that story?
In my Secrets Of Action Screenwriting book I say that a good film idea is both UNIQUE and UNIVERSAL. We want a story that everybody can understand - that deals with situations and emotions that we have all felt. I think the emotions here are universal. Even if you've never walked in on your best friend screwing your girlfriend, you know what it feels like to be betrayed... and broken hearted. So the idea is UNIVERSAL.
But what about UNIQUE? See, that's where it fails. This story has nothing that makes it different - it's about a guy who goes to 7-11 for a six pack of beer!
So let's make it more interesting by magnifying the story. We're going to take the problem and blow it all out of proportion. Instead of the six pack of beer, let's have Fred frame Ed for treason and have him sent to prison for life. And let's give them all frilly shirts and swords - it's going to be a big romantic swashbuckler! Now when Ed gets mad, he's REALLY mad - because he's stuck in prison while Mercy is screwing Fred! He breaks out of prison, becomes a pirate and loots millions, then returns to France as a millionaire Count and sets about his plan to make Fred and Mercy grovel at his feet... to destroy them as they destroyed him. Okay, that beer run to 7-11 just became THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.
But let's do it differently. Let's have Fred & Ed & Mercy be big time professional robbers. They pull this big robbery... but Fred shoots Ed and takes off with the money AND Mercy. Ed is supposed to be dead... but he drags himself away before the police arrive, and when he's back on his feet he tracks down Fred and Mercy in LA to make their life hell. It's a big underworld action movie... about betrayal and broken hearts. We'll call this one POINT BLANK (Lee Marvin played the Count, I mean Ed, I mean me, I mean the lead).
We start with the personal story that we are passionate about, the story we NEED to tell. But then we add our imagination - the betrayal and broken heart and anger can be a swashbuckler, a crime film, a western, a sci-fi film about cryanization, a time travel movie, a political thriller with Ed as a presidential assassin, a galactic war movie... it could be ANYTHING and still tell that same emotional story of Ed & Fred & Mercy. The core story - the part we're passionate about - remains the same. We've just made the situation more important and interesting. That's the greatest thing about the tool of magnification - The core of your script is going to be something personal and emotional (or you won't have the passion required to write it well), but the finished product is going to be a story that appeals to 600-800 people globally.
That audience has to PAY to see the story, so you need to engage the imagination. You need to get the creative juices flowing. You need to take that emotional seed and grow a story from it that will attract an audience. You need to take the small story and magnify it so that it will fill the big screen of a movie theater.
FATHER / DAUGHTER FIGHTING
Let's say you wanted to do a movie (semi-autobiographical) about the rocky relationship between you and your father. You come up with a father-daughter drama about a headstrong young woman who is constantly locking horns with her father. She loves him and hates him at the same time. Let's raise the dramatic stakes - Dad and mom were coming home from a party, dad crashed the car and mom died. Dad was drunk. So our daughter blames her father for the death of her mother. That's a very dramatic story that explores your personal issues with your father... but would millions of people want to see it?
The TV series ALIAS is all about the rocky relationship between a father and daughter - both are undercover spies in a world where they can't trust each other. The spy part not only makes it exciting, it actually intensifies the emotional core of the story. She really can't trust her father! His JOB is to deceive people! Her JOB is to be dishonest, too! And you get the feeling he might sacrifice her life if his life was in danger.... Talk about major father/daughter issues. There was an episode a while back where she uncovered clues that exposed the car accident that killed her mother might not have been an accident at all. Her father might have MURDERED her mother... because she was a Soviet spy! Hey - that's pretty emotional stuff! How can you ever forgive your father for murdering your mother?
Every week on ALIAS we get to see how Sidney and her father try to get along - Sunday night's conclusion of the Tarantino 2 parter had a great scene where the villain (Tarantino) tells Sidney if she doesn't give herself up he will kill his hostage... her father! Sidney is trying to disarm a huge bomb that will kill all of them. So - do you sacrifice the father you love and hate all at once and disarm the bomb? Or give yourself up... and let the bomb go off and kill everyone? By raising the stakes the story also raises the emotional level of the story. One of the reasons why ALIAS works so well is that we can easily understand Sidney's problems - we've all had problems with our parents. But her problems with her father are against a very exciting background where either one could be killed at any time. That makes those emotions we identify with DEEPER.
When you write for a mass medium like film - the stories need to get millions of butts into seats... based on a 30 second TV commercial that can really only give you the basic idea of the story. So that idea has to be exciting on its own - and appeal to hundreds of millions of people. You need to write personal stories for a mass audience. The easiest way to do that is with magnification - start with the emotional story then use your imagination to magnify the story by raising the stakes and putting it in an exciting world. It's a big screen, and we need to find big stories to fill it.
FADE OUT
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