Writers' room, End of week 4 • Structure

Four weeks have passed, an entire month in our improvised writers' room at work. One scene has been written and I'm thrilled with our progress.

I took a vacation day during week 4 to meet family in LA for a mini family reunion. When I went back to the writers' room on Thursday it was the most challenging session so far.

My cowriter and I weren't making progress and I felt low energy (unusual and a bad sign). We meet Monday to Thursday during lunch to write, but because we had to stay at work for an open house on Friday we decided to add an extra day.

Thursday night I looked up detailed notes and sequence breakdowns from Don Bohlinger's Advanced Screenplay Analysis course that he had emailed to the 80+ students in his class (USC School of Cinematic Arts). In one message he wrote that he hoped to feature some of our screenplays in his future classes. Such an amazing person!

We'd felt so lost in the writers' room that I printed notes for all of the movies we had studied in class. I printed detailed sequence breakdowns for movies including "Silence of the Lambs," "In Bruges," "The Apartment," "American Beauty," and "Lars and the Real Girl," among others. The terms listed in bold were familiar—planting, payoff, need, theme, scene of aftermath, stakes. Seeing the words "Act I: Sequence One" was scary—how could we make all of those index cards and the story fit into just eight sequences?

I also printed a glossary of film terms and a handout titled, "Want vs. Need."

One thing that has helped us decide what to include and what to eliminate as we have developed the story so far has been to continually ask if each element supports our protagonist's character arc. The details of the story and each of the people in the true story are intriguing and alluring. At one point I said, "we've lost her (our protagonist) completely!" That brought us back to our heroine and her journey.

Though Mr. Bohlinger had lectured about "want vs. need," I didn't have a full understanding of what it meant until I took Pamela Douglas's TV script analysis course last year. At the beginning of many dramatic films the character is unaware of their greatest/deepest need, only to become aware of it and against all odds, change. It's fascinating for the audience to be present with the character as the story unfolds and the character transitions from not needing or wanting love to experiencing love; or as he transforms from living a life of bitterness to experiencing hope. The film term for this is "polarity,"* and it must be equally challenging/fascinating for the actor who will play the part.

Pamela Douglas's class helped me understand that in the best television and cable programs, the characters become our friends; their character arcs often take place over several seasons/years. In a movie, extreme change (polarity) takes place during the telling of the story, often in less than two hours.

As I reviewed what comprises the three acts of a screenplay I paged through the glossary of film terms; one term led to another and then to another, equally important in understanding a single concept. I followed wherever new concepts/definitions led. As I reviewed the breakdowns for each of the movies we had studied in class I realized that the point of attack in our story was wrong. 

(Point of attack as defined by William Archer in "Playmaking," is where the dramatic conflict first appears. It's the thing in the story that changes everything;* the character/s will never be able to go back to their normal existence when it happens.)

In our writers' room we knew our characters completely; we'd discussed them for a month. We had done reviewed the facts of the real events that happened in the early 1980s and were crafting the storyline that will be written as our screenplay.

As I identified the point of attack for each movie Thursday night, I realized that in the examples the point of attack isn't a series of events. It is a single thing, a package being delivered or a character being admitted to the hospital.

There are usually two 10- to 12-minute sequences in Act I; four in Act II; and two in the third act (in Act III, the sequences are shorter than in the first two acts).*

I shared what I'd reviewed with my cowriter Friday afternoon as more than 1,000 guests toured the center where we work. At first he thought that we'd have to start writing from scratch. I assured him that nothing was going to be lost. We would use everything and would build on it.

Realizing that the point of attack often ends the first sequence in act 1 inspired us to pause and  expand on the characters' lives before we reveal the shocking event that will change her life forever. Now she doesn't stay in her living room, she goes out into her environment which is fascinating. We follow her. Who is she, why is she fighting so hard to keep her life the way it is and why is she acting so destructively that she is endangering her life and another life?

So for us, instead of constricting our creative process (which was stalled anyway), thinking about screenplay structure made the attacking octopus retreat and sink back into the depths.

As we worked, something surprising happened. Not only did we use everything we had created so far, when we began applying structure, points in the story revealed even deeper meaning. While we had been stalled completely the day before, with the structure of a screenplay as our guide we each suggested new scenes that worked beautifully.

By the end of the day Friday, we had placed the new and improved story into same format as the sequence breakdowns used for the movies in advanced screenplay analysis class. 

I'll post the rest of what happened Friday afternoon in the writers' room after I finish my homework (transcribing Friday's handwritten notes into our own formal Sequence breakdown for our screenplay). We plan to begin writing the screenplay tomorrow as we begin week 5 in the writers' room.

Our goal remains the same: to complete and enter the screenplay into the 2013 Nicholl Fellowships competition.

*From notes/Don Bohlinger's advanced screenplayl analysis course.