PERSONAL
INJURIES
by William C. Martell
POP QUIZ. Which hurts more: hitting your elbow on a
door frame or getting blasted by a laser? The obvious answer is
the laser blast, but it isn't the correct answer. If I were to
show you a film clip where a man hit his elbow on a door frame,
you'd go "ouch". You'd understand the pain and empathize with the
man. But if I showed you a "Star Trek" clip where a laser
dissolves a man, it wouldn't effect you. You've never been hit by
a laser blast, you have no idea what it feels like.
We all know about the evils of abstracts. Mystery novelist
and TV writer Joe Gores says in the Mystery Writer's Handbook,
"Don't indulge in 'soft' writing. A street, means any street. A
car, means any car. I want to see a specific street, a specific
car. Hard detail is what makes a story believable."
You probably take special care when deciding whether your
protagonist drives a sports car or a family sedan, if he wears
tennis shoes or spats; but even specifics can be abstracts if the
audience hasn't experienced them personally.
Which takes us back to that laser gun. Even if you actually
know how lasers work, create a brand name and specifications,
fill in all the knobs and do-dads; the audience still won't feel
the pain along with your laser blastee.
George Lucas figured out a way to by-pass this problem by
creating 'light sabers', which are basically laser blades. They
cut. We all know what it is like to get cut, don't we?
Using action and violence in your script is meaningless
unless your audience can feel it. Remember: Film is
communication. Your script must be designed to communicate with
the audience (through the medium of the camera and the actors).
The difference between effective violence and gratuitous violence
is: Gratuitous violence isn't felt by the audience. It's just
exploitation. Spurting blood and exploding heads. Who among us
have had our heads explode? (If this HAS happened to you, please
don't write me... I'd rather not know).
So violence must be personalized.
Here are three examples of action scenes which work because
the audience understands the results of the violence:
Steven deSouza's "Die Hard" contains one of the most painful
moments on film. John McClane is our barefoot hero, taking on a
team of ruthless terrorists. Hans and Karl have cornered McClane
in the Computer Room, and the three are involved in a shoot out.
* * *
HANS
looks at the glass all around him, gets and idea. He SHOUTS to
Karl:
HANS
The glass! Shoot the glass!
And, saying this, he demonstrates. Karl follows suit.
McCLANE
As glass flies everywhere, McClane sees one option and takes it.
BLASTING a burst to keep their heads down, he WHIRLS, JUMPS on
top of a long counter and RUNS ACROSS THE ROOM. Their BULLETS
follow him, six inches behind his moving form.
McClane reaches the end of the counter, DIVES to the floor:
HIS FOOT
goes right down on a jagged SHARD. He groans, keeps going.
STAIRWELL DOOR
He's out, gone, safe.
INT. BATHROOM - NIGHT
McClane all but crawls inside. His dragging foot leaving a trail
of blood on the linoleum.
Wincing in pain, McClane washes his foot in a sink basin. He
washes a deep cut, but the pain doesn't relent.
* * *
When I was a kid, I was walking barefoot in my back yard and
stepped on a nail. It went right through my foot. I'll bet, in
your life, you once stepped on broken glass while barefoot. It
hurts. We know it hurts. When John McClane drags himself into the
bathroom, we know EXACTLY how he feels. The pain is real for us,
more real than a shotgun blast.
My second example is from the classic Dean Riesner scripted
"Play Misty For Me". Clint Eastwood is having a major ex-
girlfriend problem: She is trying to kill him. With a knife. A
very sharp knife. Do you know what 'defense wounds' are?
She attacks Clint with the knife, stabbing out at his face.
Not wanting to get stabbed in the face, he catches the knife in
his hand. Ouch! There's a close up shot of the blade slicing his
fingers as he tries to hang onto it. Double ouch! Then she pulls
the blade back, out of his hand, practically severing his
fingers. Triple ouch!
How many of us have been chopping an onion and cut
ourselves? Probably everyone. Again, we know EXACTLY how being
cut with a knife feels. When it happens on screen, part of the
audience's brain flashes back to the time THEY were cut, and they
instantly feel the pain.
My last example is from a dark comedy film called "Swimming
With Sharks" about a Personal Assistant who holds his mean
spirited Boss hostage and metes out a strange revenge for on the
job abuse. I've seen this film four times, and every time the
audience jumps at one painful scene. Even though I know the scene
is coming, it still affects me:
The Personal Assistant takes a crisp, clean, new piece of
paper and slashes his Boss's face with paper cuts. Ouch! He also
cuts his Boss's tongue with a sharp envelope flap. Ouch! This
scene was worse for me than "Play Misty For Me". I work with
paper and envelopes EVERY DAY. Paper cuts hurt worse than
anything else on earth (including that nail in the foot). And a
paper cut on your tongue? I've had one before. The pain stays for
weeks! If you haven't seen "Swimming With Sharks", it's well
worth a rent. Oh, and did I mention the Boss is a film producer?
The key to writing an effective action sequence is to make
sure the violence is something the audience understands, and can
empathize with. As B-Movie Maven Fred Olen Ray once asked me: "If
a man is shot by a laser and falls down, is the laser on stun or
kill? Is he hurt or dead?" We don't know, because we've never
been shot by a laser.
Personalizing action/violence/pain means showing us the
DETAILS. Details which we understand. Say you have a plane crash
survivor forced to search for help in a rocky terrain. He has
been walking all day, and stops to take off his dress shoes. When
he takes off his socks, we see the blisters on his feet. Big,
painful blisters. Some have broken open, and when the air touches
the nerve endings, our Survivor gasps in pain.
Anyone who has ever had new dress shoes knows how this
feels. Because this is drama, we have MAGNIFIED the injury and
the pain. Taken it up a couple of notches. Steven deSouza's
"Commando" ends with an epic battle in the furnace room of a
mansion. At one point, John Matrix's face is pressed against the
furnace door. Sizzle! We know how that feels, from the time we
lifted the pan without a pot holder. DeSouza has magnified the
pain by making the furnace door red hot, and subject of the burn
our hero's face. You know that's gotta hurt!
When you are writing a fight scene, think of the detail. The
personal injury which will make your audience gasp in
identification. I like to have villains break my hero's fingers,
either by crushing them or bending them backwards. We know that
hurts. Did you know that a pistol barrel gets hot after firing?
Hot enough to burn? When I have two characters struggling with a
gun which keeps discharging, I like to add in the burn factor.
Grab the barrel... sizzle... ouch! We may not have burned our
hands on a gun barrel, but we've burned our hands on SOMETHING.
We know exactly how it feels.
We know how it feels to have someone step on our foot really
hard, to get something in our eye, to get a pavement scrape, etc.
These are the kinds of things to use in your action scenes to
make them effective.
WHEN YOU WANT TO HURT THE WORLD
Your villain has spent his entire life hurting people one by
one, and now he's ready to move on to world destruction and/or
domination. He wants to blow up Cleveland or wipe out his
enemies' family lines. How do you make such massive destruction
personal? There are two ways to make big action effective on
screen.
ONE: Make sure your protagonist has a stake in the outcome,
and make sure the audience's identification with your protagonist
is VERY strong. A good example is Donald Stewart and W. Peter
Iliff's "Patriot Games". We are introduced to family man Harrison
Ford, his wife and daughter. We learn to care about them as a
family. When Ford steps in to thwart a terrorist bombing, not
only do the terrorist come after him, they come after his family
as well. Ford must stop the Terrorists, because he and his family
are directly threatened.
If your villain is killing a bunch of people you don't know,
or don't care about, it is meaningless violence. Giving a spear-
carrier a scene where he is kind to small animals before he is
killed just doesn't cut it. Audiences see it coming from a mile
away. Is there anyone in the world who saw "Top Gun" and didn't
KNOW Goose was about to die after they suddenly introduce his
wife and family halfway through the film?
TWO: Have the Villain's Plan threaten the audience. We are
sitting in the theater, minding our own business, when the
Villain threatens to unleash a virus which will spread like
wildfire. We see a map of the United States, and Donald
Sutherland shows us how far the virus will spread in 24 hours...
48 hours... 96 hours (entire map is covered). Now the audience is
affected by the villain's plan. If the hero doesn't stop him WE
will die.
This method works best in films like "Fail Safe" and "War
Games", where a nuclear incident will start a nuclear war which
will probably destroy the world. The audience itself is
threatened by the villain's actions. We will become the victims.
In my script "Crash Dive!", a group of terrorists have
hijacked a 688 Attack Class nuclear submarine, and are
threatening to nuke New York. Because I realized that might sound
like a good idea to some audience members, I added the threat of
firing at some random "small town" targets as well. Like the very
city where the movie theater you're watching "Crash Dive!" is
located in. Now you, the viewer, have a stake in the outcome.
The ultimate audience threat was in the William Castle film
"The Tingler". At the end of the film, the Tingler escapes into a
movie theater... the one YOU'RE sitting in! Vincent Price looks
RIGHT AT YOU and warns you "It's under your seat". Theaters were
wired with buzzers under some of the seats to reproduce the
feeling of the Tingler's attack. I'm sure a few people jumped.
THE ONE THING YOU DON'T WANT TO DO when creating violence in
an action scene is to make it ineffective and painless. If the
audience doesn't feel anything when a character is killed or
injured, that's akin to pornography. It's violence desensitized.
In Shane Black's "The Last BoyScout", one of our heroes gets
a knife stuck RIGHT THROUGH HIS HAND. He is pegged to a desk. He
pulls the knife out, wraps a handkerchief around the wound, and
is as good as new. This very violent act was without pain,
without feeling... desensitized.
In Shane Black's "The Long Kiss Goodnight", Henessey gets
beat up, shot a dozen times, blown out of an exploding building,
and manages to walk away unharmed. None of the violence in this
script has any effect on anyone. Getting blown out of a building
doesn't matter to Henessey, so why should it matter to the
audience? Getting shot doesn't matter. Getting hit doesn't
matter. When the bad guys kidnap Charly's daughter... it just
doesn't matter to us. If they shoot her, she'll just get up and
walk away, right?
Wrong. In real life pain hurts. Our job as screenwriters is
to make an emotional connection with our audience. To INVOLVE
them. To allow them to feel our characters' pain, and our
characters' joys. To do that, we must personalize our stories and
our action scenes and make the audience an active participant in
our script.
When you get ready to write the next draft of your script,
just remember: This time, it's PERSONAL.
FADE OUT
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