WHAT GOES AROUND
by William C. Martell
Decades before Syd Field was even born,
Anton Chekhov
said that if you show a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One, you must
use that pistol by Act
Three. The playwright of THE CHERRY ORCHARD and UNCLE VANYA
wasn't
talking about story structure, he was making a point about set
ups and pay offs. In the
real world most things in life have no meaning. That day when you
ordered rye toast
with breakfast and they gave you wheat toast will have no lasting
impact on your life.
A week later you will have forgotten it. Even the most important
thing that happens to
you this week will probably be forgotten a year from now. The big
turning points in our
lives may seem meaningless at the time they happen. You may be 95
years old, on
your death bed, and realize that the most important moment of
your entire life might
be when you were riding your snow sledge as a child. (What was
the name of that
sledge again?)
The reel world of movies only lasts two hours, so we can
remember every detail. If
our protagonist gets the wrong toast on page 5, that's still
fresh in the audience's mind
on page 95. A screenplay is a life condensed to 110 pages - every
single moment is
important. Every event has meaning. If the wrong toast doesn't
change the course of
the script or come back later to haunt the hero, it's not
important enough to be in the
script in the first place.
My background is mystery fiction, where everything is a clue
or a "red herring"
(information designed to divert the audiences' attention from
more important
information.) If you have a character wearing a green necktie
instead of a blue necktie
that may be the piece of information that proves he's the killer
(Cornell Woolrich's THE
PHANTOM LADY). Lucy Fletcher's 80 DOLLARS TO STAMFORD hinges on
the
specific model of automobile a character's husband drove ten
years ago. The smallest
detail may eventually come around as the critical clue that
cracks the case.
Not only should every detail in your screenplay be critical to
the telling of your
story, you should take advantage of those details to create
moments of revelation
when the importance of those details become important to the
audience. Throughout
your script you should be "setting up" plot, character, dialogue
and actions that you
can later "pay off" to create an emotional response in the
audience. We want the
audience to feel what our characters feel, to have an emotional
experience. Set ups
and pay offs are important tools we can use to reveal information
and create an
emotionally charged moment for the audience.
Chris Nolan's mystery film MEMENTO Is a great example of how
to expertly use
this tool. The clever script is about insurance investigator
Leonard Shelby who suffers
short term memory loss after his wife is brutally murdered... and
is tracking down the
killers. He can remember what he did two years ago, but not what
he did two hours
ago. Leonard writes notes to himself, tattoos important clues to
his body so that he
can't misplace them, and takes Polaroids of everyone he meets
with notes jotted in
the margins identifying them as friend or suspect. Every tattoo,
every note on every
Polaroid, is a set up that will pay off before the film is
over... often in unusual and
unpredictable ways.
YROTS EHT LLET UOY WOH
In order to make the audience feel the confusion of Leonard's
short term memory
loss, the film opens with the end then goes BACKWARDS
scene-by-scene to show
you HOW that end came to be. We finally get to the spark that set
off the story - and
that's the end of the film! Most stories are about WHAT happens,
MEMENTO is about
WHY things happen. Murder mysteries start with a crime and then
the detective
probes the past to find the events leading up to that crime...
ending with the solution
to the crime. MEMENTO begins with a murder and takes us back
through the past,
focusing on motives, until we discover WHY the murder
occurred.
Though MEMENTO may seem like some bizarre structure because
the story is
told backwards, it's actually a traditional three acts. Act One
introduces the problem:
Leonard kills the man that he thinks murdered his wife. Act Two
escalates the conflict:
Piece by piece we learn about the wife's murder, the suspects,
and we begin to
wonder if Leonard shot the right guy! Act Three resolves the
conflict: Because we're
moving BACKWARDS we eventually get to the wife's murder and earn
why she was
killed. This answers the WHY question, resolving the conflict in
a very unexpected
way.
Remember, we want to give the audience an emotional
experience, and the
method we use to tell our story is critical. HOW we give the
audience information is
just as important as the information itself. You may conceal
information to create
suspense and reveal it later. In my script for THE BASE the base
commander blames
our hero for the death of his son during Desert Storm. The most
interesting way to
give the audience this information was in a series of flashbacks
parceled out a bit at a
time throughout the script so that the backstory ran parallel to
the main story... and
made the hero's responsibility in the death a mystery. PETULIA
(1968) intertwines
past and present stories in a love story about an abused wife's
affair with her doctor...
holding information until the exact moment when it will have
maximum impact on the
audience. Nic Roeg films from the early 1970s like DON'T LOOK NOW
throws
chronology out the window, bouncing through time from event to
event, using the
impact of each scene on the protagonist as the basis for its
three act structure.
Atom Egoyan's EXOTICA gives us several seemingly unrelated
characters
and reveals their
relationships as the film progresses, surprising us when we
finally learn the connection
between a stripper and her favorite customer at the end of the
film. HOW you tell the
story is just as important as the story itself. By using a
backwards scene-by-scene
form (like that episode of SEINFELD where Elaine's bra-less
friend gets married in
India) MEMENTO gives the audience Leonard's short term memory
loss - we have no
idea who these people are or whether we can trust them or how we
came to be here.
All we can do is consult the notes scribbled on Leonard's
Polaroids.
PLOT SET UPS
Those Polaroids become a great "set up" device. Carrie-Anne
Moss plays a
mysterious woman named Natalie whose Polaroid has two messages
under the photo.
The first has been completely scribbled out - we can't read it.
The second says "She
has also lost someone. She will help you out of pity." This "sets
up" the writing of the
second message, the events that caused Leonard to scribble out
the first message,
and creates the mystery: what was the first message? The photo
itself is a set up:
Natalie is show in profile in a dark room, silhouetted by soft
light from a curtained
window. Where was the photo taken? Who is Natalie? Who has she
lost? Why does
she pity Leonard? What does she have to do with the murder of
Leonard's wife? One
Polaroid photo sets up dozens of pay offs, each one revealing a
new aspect of Natalie
and her relationship with Leonard and his quest for vengeance.
Instead of learning
everything about Natalie up front, by using set ups and pay offs
she remains a
mystery - always seen in silhouette, illuminated a little bit at
a time.
Joe Pantoliano plays a policeman named Teddy. At the beginning
of the film, his
Polaroid says "Don't believe his lies". Throughout the film that
information is constantly
being used by Leonard to help him make decisions... and a
terrific set up that pays off
in a very unexpected way when we learn what "lies" the note
refers to. A good plot
pay off gives us information that not only changes the direction
of the story, it changes
our understanding of the story we have seen so far. The pay off
becomes a plot
twist.
Plot pay offs are the reason why we cheer when Han Solo
returns for the final
battle in STAR WARS, the reason why we cry when E.T. touches
Elliott's heart and
says "I'll be right here", and the reason why we laugh when we
see the dog in the full-
body cast in THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY. These moments were
carefully
"set up" earlier in the film - planted like seeds so that they
could bloom later in the
film. The key to a great pay off is to either set it up so early
in the script that the
audience has almost forgotten it, or to come up with a completely
unexpected pay off:
"She's my sister AND my daughter" from CHINATOWN. You want to
tie up the loose
ends, but you don't want to be predictable.
SCENE PAY OFFS
Because of the unusual way that MEMENTO is told, there are set
ups and pay
offs in every scene. Miniature versions of those Polaroids. One
scene opens with
Leonard sitting in a bathroom with a bottle of vodka in his
hand.
LEONARD (V.O.)
Don't feel drunk.
Leonard looks up from the vodka bottle, sighs,
rubs his face, then stands up.
He sniffs at his armpit.
He puts the empty bottle on the counter by the
sink, then wearily undresses.
Leonard, naked, looks in the mirror, then runs the
shower, then steps under it, shutting the pebbled
plastic stall door.
Leonard showers. He turns the water off, then hears
the DOOR BEING UNLOCKED. Leonard freezes, standing
in the shower stall, naked and dripping. Through the
distortion of the pebbled plastic door, Leonard sees a
figure enter the bathroom.
The vodka bottle is a set up that will be
paid off at the end
of the next scene... When Leonard enters a suspect's motel room,
grabs the vodka
bottle to use as a weapon, and lies in wait in the bathroom,
knowing that the suspect
will return to the room in a few minutes!
Even a script that isn't backward will use scene pay offs. In
my cable movie HARD
EVIDENCE my businessman hero meets a blackmailer in an empty
parking garage.
The blackmailer pulls a gun on him... but the hero kicks it out
of his hand! The gun
skitters under a parked car - out of play. The two fight -
punching and kicking at each
other - until the hero knocks the blackmailer to the floor. As
the hero advances, the
blackmailer scrambles backwards... until he's stopped by a parked
car. No escape.
The hero approaches. Then the blackmailer starts laughing.
Remember that gun the
hero kicked out of his hand at the beginning of the scene? Set up
and pay off!
CHARACTER SET UPS
Set ups and pay offs are also a great way to show the
relationship between
characters, like Melissa Matheson did in E.T. THE EXTRA
TERRESTRIAL. Let's say
you're writing a script about a tough Navy SEAL Team. In an early
scene the religious
member of the team wants to say a prayer before they go into
battle. Your hero says
he hasn't been inside a church since he was a kid. The religious
guy says, "Don't
worry, God takes care of the brave." Later in the script the
religious guy gets shot. He lays there dying but can't reach his
crucifix.
Your hero puts it
in his hand and tells him
not to worry - God takes care of the brave. That creates an
emotional moment based
on the prior relationship between the two men. A character set up
that pays off.
James Cameron's ALIENS is filled with character set ups and
pay offs. When
Ripley first meets android Bishop she freaks:
RIPLEY
You never said anything about an
android being here!
BISHOP
I prefer the term "artificial person"
myself. Is there a problem?
Later, Bishop will be the one who helps
save her life,
creating an emotional moment when she puts her hand on his
shoulder and says:
RIPLEY
You did okay, Bishop.
A simple line, but given emotional power
from the set up 90
pages earlier. There's an antagonistic relationship between tough
female Marine
Vasquez and new Lieutenant Gorman ("How many drops is this for
you, Lieutenant?"
"Thirty-eight... simulated.") that pays off when she and Gorman
are trapped in an air
duct together as an army of alien warriors approaches. She gives
him the "power
greeting" she only shares with a chosen few to show her respect.
Gorman returns the
greeting and hands her two grenades, keeping two for himself.
When the creatures
descend upon them, the two who were once enemies die together...
as friends.
PAYBACK LINES
In my (out of print) book THE SECRETS
OF ACTION SCREENWRITING I explain how
"payback lines" work in action films. A payback line is a snappy
line uttered by the
villain to the hero in their initial confrontation which the hero
"pays back" to the villain
in the final confrontation. The first scene sets up the line and
the later scene pays it
off. Audiences love payback lines because they show that the hero
is now more
powerful than the villain. John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT
13 is payback
line city! In an early scene the mean prison warden hits
charismatic career criminal
Napoleon Wilson so hard he flies out of his chair. When a guard
asks what happened,
the warden explains that Wilson "doesn't sit as well as he used
to." Later, when
Wilson is being herded into a prison bus in shackles, he swings
the chains and trips
the warden to the asphalt. A guard points his shotgun at Wilson,
who smiles and says,
"The warden don't stand as good as he used to." The line always
gets a laugh and
shows how clever Wilson is - if you give him trouble he gives the
same trouble back to
you.
In my sci-fi script ANDROID ARMY I have a similar situation
where our prisoner
hero tells the guard who rubs him the wrong way that "One day you
and me are going
to fight... but not today." Later in the film the two end up the
last survivors of an attack
by terminator robots, and our prisoner hero says to the guard,
"Today's the day. You
and me is gonna fight... just not each other." The two fight the
army of androids side-
by-side. You were expecting the pay off would be them fighting
each other?
Payback Lines aren't only found in action and thriller
scripts, in my friends Kiwi &
Karen's movie LEGALLY BLONDE Reese Witherspoon's preppie
boyfriend breaks up
with her - saying that he plans on a career as a Senator and
she's just not Senator's
spouse material. After Reese wins the big case and becomes a
national celebrity, the
boyfriend comes crawling back and asks if she'll marry him. She
shoots him down by
saying some day she may be a Senator, and he's just not Senator's
spouse material.
When I saw the film on opening night the audience cheered at that
line.
PROPS THAT PAY OFF
One of the Polaroids in MEMENTO is a picture of Leonard's car
so that he can
find it in a parking lot if he forgets the make and model. Early
in the script Teddy tries
to convince Leonard that a plain looking gray sedan is his car,
but the Polaroid shows
a late model Jaguar and is inscribed "My Car". Leonard tells him,
"You shouldn't make
fun of somebody's handicap," as he climbs into the Jag. Later in
the film that Polaroid
of the Jaguar will pay off in an unexpected way.
The Coen Brothers'
BLOOD SIMPLE also sets up props then pays
them off in
unexpected ways. Our hero Ray is having an affair with his boss's
wife... finds the
boss dead in his bar and is sure that the wife killed him. So he
covers up the crime.
He puts the murder gun in the boss' pocket and dumps the body in
the back seat of
his car. He drives for hours until he finds a field in the middle
of nowhere and digs a
grave. When he goes back to the car to get the body, it's gone!
Seems the boss
wasn't quite dead yet, and is now crawling away! Ray grabs him,
drags him to the
grave and tosses him in. Then reaches for the shovel. Remember
that gun Ray put in
the boss' pocket? Pay off! The boss aims the gun at Ray's face
and pulls the
trigger!
Another great use of props that pay off comes when the
not-quite-dead boss
confronts his wife. He says, "You left your weapon behind" and
throws something to
her. The gun that was used to shoot him? No... her compact!
Throughout the film we
have seen her use the compact to touch up her make up. The line
of dialogue is
EXACTLY the same thing Ray told her after cleaning up the murder
scene, but he
was referring to her gun. By using the line in reference to her
compact, the wife's
BEAUTY becomes her "weapon"... she lures men to their doom!
PACKING THEM IN
Think of set ups as the gadgets in James Bond's briefcase.
There's a hidden
throwing knife, a canister of knock out gas, a secret camera,
fifty gold sovereigns in a
hidden money belt, a secret compartment and a homing device. Once
Q sets up these
gadgets we eagerly await the scenes where Bond gets to use each
of them. That
doesn't mean we should use each gadget the way the audience
expects it to be used.
The audience might guess Bond will use that money belt to bribe
someone... but a
belt filled with gold also makes a good weapon!
So pack your suitcase carefully! 110 pages leaves no room for
things you aren't
going to use. Make sure your screenplay is filled with clever set
ups that pay off in
interesting and unexpected ways. In MEMENTO Leonard has the six
critical clues to
his wife's killer tattooed on his body: "Fact 1: Male. Fact 2:
White. Fact 3: First name:
John or James. Fact 4: Last name: G______. Fact 5: Drug Dealer.
Fact 6: Car
License Number: SG13 7IU." All of these are set ups, but none pay
off in the way you
expect them to. Now... where was I?
FADE OUT
The 2001 London Class on 8 CDs! Recorded *live* the morning after the Raindance Film Festival
wrapped. The two day class on 8 CDs, plus a workbook, plus a bonus CD with over 400 screenplay PDFs - all 3 BOURNE movies, all 3 MATRIX movies, all 3
Indiana Jones movies, plus all kinds of action and thriller and scripts from Hitchcock films. Most of the 2008 Black List scripts.
Yeah, I threw in some Charlie Kauffman and rom-com scripts and some National Lampoon Vacation movie scripts,
too. Plus, an orginal brochure for the class. All for one reasonable price: $99.95.
(If you had taken the class in London it would have cost you $450... plus airfare, plus hotel, plus you'd have to eat "mushy peas" for dinner.)
