Gay, Andrew. " the Cowboy, the Spaceman and the Guru: Character
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Gay, Andrew. " The Cowboy, the Spaceman and the Guru: Character and Convention in the Screenwriting of Toy Story." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. By Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 39–58. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501324949.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 00:36 UTC. Copyright © Susan Smith, Sam Summers and Noel Brown 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 39 Chapter 3 T HE COWBOY, THE SPACEMAN AND THE GURU: CHARACTER AND CONVENTION IN THE SCREENWRITING OF TOY STORY Andrew Gay And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. Th at just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year aft er that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.1 — Andrew Stanton, co- screenwriter of Toy Story . A rule says, ‘You must do it this way’. A principle says, ‘Th is works . and has through all remembered time’. Th e diff erence is crucial.2 — Robert McKee, screenwriting guru. Th e Rules of the Game Since launching into the feature fi lmmaking business with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) – the fi rst animated fi lm in the history of the Oscars to be nom- inated for Best Original Screenplay 3 – the Pixar Animation Studios brand has earned an unrivalled reputation for powerful and eff ective storytelling. Of its eighteen features released to date, only Cars 2 (John Lasseter and Brad Lewis, 2011) and Cars 3 (Brian Fee, 2017) have disappointed critically,4 and Th e Good Dinosaur (Peter Sohn, 2015) failed to meet box offi ce expectations.5 O t h e r w i s e , Pixar has enjoyed an unprecedented run with critics and audiences alike, and aspiring screenwriters have grown eager to learn the secret to Pixar’s string of successful scripts. Pixar’s orientation to story and script emerged during the development pro- cess of Toy Story in the early 1990s, so if we want to understand the eff ective- ness of Pixar’s screenwriting, it makes sense to return to the beginning – to Toy Story ’s script and its writing process – to see what they can teach us. How did a group of animators with no experience of writing feature fi lms learn to tell 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 3399 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:32:49:32 PPMM 40 40 Andrew Gay appealing screen stories? Th is chapter examines two contributing infl uences in the development of Toy Story ’s screenplay: fi rst, the character- shaping prin- ciples taught by screenwriting guru Robert McKee, whose popular weekend ‘Story’ seminar the Pixar team attended in 1992, 6 and second, the genre con- ventions of the buddy picture – or what McKee terms the ‘Buddy Salvation’ plot 7 – which the Pixar team sought to emulate. 8 I assess Toy Story ’s adherence to McKee’s principles as articulated in his book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1997), published subsequent to Toy Story ’s commercial release, and I also compare Toy Story with notable examples of buddy salvation that Pixar’s John Lasseter and others have credited as having been genre infl uences, namely 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, 1982), Th e Defi ant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), Midnight Run (Martin Brest, 1988) , Th e Odd Couple (Gene Saks, 1968) and Th elma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). Before doing either, however, I off er an overview of Toy Story ’s script development. Requests by this author to access the many draft scripts of Toy Story that reside in Pixar’s archives were denied. Without earlier script versions to study, this chapter draws from other published accounts of Toy Story ’s early devel- opment in its analysis of the only publicly available draft of the screenplay, a release script dated November 1995 and marked ‘FINAL DRAFT’, with an original story credited to John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft , and authorship of the screenplay itself credited to Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton and the writing team of Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow. 9 Working with a release script off ers an imperfect solution. As Chris Pallant and Steven Price have observed, such authorized publications oft en ‘impose a retrospective nar- rative upon the production of the fi lm, generally privileging a linear version of production development, which in practice is frequently less straightforward than might at fi rst appear . the published forms of screenplays and story- boards have tended to diff er in crucial respects from the material that was actu- ally created in the making of a fi lm’. 10 Indeed, the release script for Toy Story includes none of the deleted or extended scenes available as bonus features on any of the fi lm’s various DVD or Blu- ray releases and appears to refl ect all of the fi nal changes made by the creative team prior to Toy Story ’s theatrical open- ing. Th e only perceptible diff erence between the published screenplay and the distributed motion picture appears to occur on page six of the script, on which ‘HAMM, the piggy bank, fl ips one last penny into his coin slot’.11 In the fi lm, Hamm fl ips a quarter into his slot instead, a minor but obvious change and the only clear detail I have found to otherwise distinguish the fi nal draft from a word- for- word transcript of the completed fi lm. Story Toys: How to Write a Hit Pixar Screenplay Toy Story ’s original treatment was co- written by director John Lasseter, super- vising animator Pete Docter and character designer Andrew Stanton, with 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 4400 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:32:49:32 PPMM 41 Th e Cowboy, the Spaceman and the Guru 41 Toy Story initially intended only as a working title.12 In March 1991, Lasseter delivered the treatment to Jeff rey Katzenberg, then the head of Walt Disney Studios, just as Disney and Pixar were fi nalizing negotiations to partner on the co- production of their fi rst fully computer animated feature motion picture. 13 According to David A. Price: It paired Tinny, the one- man band from [Pixar’s short fi lm] Tin Toy [1988], with a ventriloquist’s dummy (known only as ‘the dummy’) and sent them on a sprawling odyssey, one that was to take them from the back of a truck to an auction, a garbage truck, a yard sale, a couple’s house, and fi nally a kinder- garten playground. Yet the core idea of Toy Story was present from the fi rst treatment onward: that toys deeply want children to play with them, and that this desire drives their hopes, fears, and actions. 14 Based on the strength of this fi rst treatment, an agreement was fi nalized between Disney and Pixar by July 1991.15 Th e most signifi cant term of that agreement noted by Price, at least as it pertains to the screenwriting of Toy Story , is that it ‘gave Katzenberg fi nal control over all creative decisions. If dissatisfi ed with Pixar’s script, Disney could bring in screenwriters of its choosing.’16 Katzenberg wielded a heavy hand over the development of Toy Story from the beginning. According to Price, ‘Disney exercised its right to install out- side screenwriters, hiring the comedy- writing team of Joel Cohen and National Lampoon alumnus Alex Sokolow to work with Pixar’s story team on the script.’ 17 Likewise, Katzenberg pushed hard for a more adult vision of Toy Story. According to Sokolow: [Katzenberg] really wanted it to have an edge. One of the things he kept say- ing to me and my writing partner, Joel Cohen . was that he wanted us to write an R- rated script . Th at was something lost in the narrative from Pixar about Toy Story . Th at fi rst draft had characters breaking the fourth wall, cursing, and trying to kill themselves. It was a very dark script. We had Buzz, when he realised he was a toy, stick his hand in a light socket.18 Katzenberg may have also played a role in steering the Pixar team toward genre conventions to solve story problems apparent in the original treatment. ‘At fi rst there was no drama, no real story, and no confl ict’, says Katzenberg. 19 Price recounts how Katzenberg, concerned that the two leads ‘wanted the same things for the same reasons’, suggested that Pixar should pursue the structure of ‘an odd- couple buddy picture in the mold of 48 Hrs. and Th e Defi ant Ones . Both fi lms centred on two men thrown together by circumstance and forced to cooperate in spite of their hostility, eventually gaining one another’s respect.’20 Elsewhere, however, Lasseter claims more independence in Pixar’s selection of genre and has framed the buddy picture direction as a kind of rebellion against the Disney house style: 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 4411 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:32:49:32 PPMM 42 42 Andrew Gay We actually made a list of what we wanted our movie not to be. We didn’t want it to be a musical; we didn’t want it to have like a good guy and a bad guy, and you know, sidekicks and all that stuff .