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Plots and Characters a Screenwriter on Screenwriting Page iii Plots and Characters A Screenwriter on Screenwriting by Millard Kaufman Page iv Copyright © 1999 by Millard Kaufman All rights reserved. Printed in China. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Photo and excerpt credits on page 263 Every effort has been made to locate copyrighted material that appears in this book as required under copyright law. For some materials, however, the publisher has been unable to identify or locate the copyright holder. In such cases, copyright holders are invited to contact the publisher, who will be pleased to make the necessary arrange- ments at the first opportunity Really Great Books, P O. Box 292000. Los Angeles. CA 90029 Visit our Web site at www.reallygreatbooks.com First Printing May, 1999 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaufman, Millard Plots and Characters A Screenwriter on Screenwriting 288 p 15 24×22 86 cm. ISBN 1-893329-03-8 1. Screenwriting 2. Hollywood 3. Film Industry I Title II Kaufman, Millard CIP 98-89055 Cover design Amy Inouye Cover photograph: Larry Underhill REALLY GREAT BOOKS are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums, for educational purposes, and/or sales promotions For more information, please write to the Special Sales Department, Really Great Books, P.O Box 292000, Los Angeles, CA 90029 Page v To my wife, Lorraine Paley Kaufman, with love and gratitude, for sharing and caring and pointing the way. Page vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Arthur Laurents, for all the talk and explorations past midnight, spanning more than fifty years. To Dorris Halsey, my agent, whose discernment was always tempered with kindness. To Nina Wiener, my editor, whose flights of logic and guidance were always on the wings of excitement. To my daughters Mary and Amy, and their respective husbands, Scott and Bern, and to my son Frederick and his wife Lizzie, and to my grandchildren David, Kevin, Anschel, Jared, Ariela, and Phoebe, for all the fun I would have missed without them. For the students of the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and at the Sundance Institute, who gave as good as they got. For the membership of the Writers Guilds of America, East and West, for questioning everything as writers should. And in memory of the men of the Third and Sixth Marine Divisions in WWII, without whose expertise and sacrifice I'd never have made it this far. Page vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword ix I. The Business of Writing 1. Pitfalls and Pratfalls: You Know Who Did the Hair? 1 2. Top Dogs, Big Brass: Don't Show Up 21 3. Writing, and Writhing: Growing Corns on Your Ass 33 4. Running the Bases: You've Got To Hit It First 47 II. Writing in Hollywood (Or Anywhere Else) 5. Getting Going: Prejudice and the Script 59 6. Rewrites and Critiques: Arm Wrestling the Muse Is Not 75 Enough 7. Speed and Stagnation: How Good Are You at 91 Defrosting a Refrigerator? III. The Script: Basics 8. From Greece to Hollywood: Why Aren't You Home 109 Writing? 9. Catechism Beginning with Theme: Stick to It Like 117 Grim Death Page viii 10. The Three-Act Form: Surrender and We'll Give You a 125 Second Act 11. Plot and Subplot: Thirty-Six Situations Including The 139 Horse Will Help Her 12. Character: Heroes and Heavies Raising a Fist Against 147 Fate 13. Anatomy of a Screenplay: Emotions Are the Only 163 Facts IV. The Script: Making It Rich 14. A Piece of the Action: Invoking the Worst Calamity 175 15. Conflict and Empathy: The Cardinal Virtues 191 16. The Parabola of Change: The Three C's 201 17. Plants and Payoffs: Progressing Backwards 209 18. Dialogue and Preachment: What's Said 223 19. The Orchestration of Urgency: Exaggeration and 229 Excitement 20. A Miscellany of Basics: Examined at the Risk of 235 Belaboring the Obvious 21. End Game: The Road to Fade-Out 249 Index 255 Page ix FOREWORD In the last half-centurygive or take a few yearseverything reported in the following pages took place. It should be noted that with only the slightest variations, it is still going on. In chronological time this book deals with Hollywood people and their relationships, their affinities and their contrarieties, when the great monolithic studio system crested to the meridian of its health and wealth, and then with cataclysmic suddenness, declined and disappeared back into the primordial gumbo from which, like the dinosaurs themselves, it had emerged. They could rise up again, modified to some degree, in the future. In cyclic Hollywood the vibrant present is always prologue to the past. The citizens who make up this earth-circling community today might have been cloned from their archetypes, so alike they are in their reasoning, their attitudes, and their actions, since this scorched and dusty village between the desert and the sea coagulated into the entertainment capital of the world. Alfonse Karr's delphic epigramthe more things change the more they remain the samecertainly applies to Hollywood. The focus of this book is three-fold. It examines what it's like to be a working writer in the picture business. It explores aspects of the business itself, and the people in it. And, primarily, it concentrates on the requisites of a viable screenplay. Throughout the text, examples have been drawn and emphasis has been placed on classic, keystone films regardless of their age. Trendiness and immediacy have been sacrificed; in most cases they are better ignored than extolled. As regards the art (or craft) of screenwriting, both theory and technique flow down the ages from the works of playwrights anterior to ours. Their dramaturgic values still derive from and conform to elements that go back as far as the tragedies of Aeschylus and the analysis of Aristotle about 2,300 years ago. Style, stance, and technology change, but the elements of drama do not. They are as valid and as applicable in twenty-first-century Hollywood as they were in Athens more than three centuries before the birth of Christianity. Page x Like the Greek dramatists, we are constantly revamping our cherished myths, reinterpreting our historic archives to reexamine man and his humanity or lack of it. Drama, in whatever form, is as necessary to our survival as food, clothing, shelter, as irresistible as the songs and games children invent. I hope critical readers will find that my advisories on storytelling are sound, prudent, and helpful. Page xi I THE BUSINESS OF WRITING Page 1 1 Pitfalls and Pratfalls: You Know Who Did the Hair? It is a conviction generally embraced by people who work in Hollywood that everybody, regardless of qualification, wants to be in show business. I had been in Malibu at a party made memorable only because of what happened the following day. The phone rang and ''Hi,'' a strained voice said, "It's Jack." No need to tell me. I recognized the bourbon baritone of a good friend, a movie star, a Homeric boozer. "You have any idea," he went on, "when we were talking last night?" "When? Must have been about eleven o'clock. Why?" "What happened then?" Page 2 "I hung around for maybe another hour, and split." "I mean what happened to me?" "How the hell should I know?" "Well, shit, I don't know either, and that's the point. Next thing I know, I open my eyes and I'm in the Santa Monica drunk tank with a buzz saw in my head. There's a clock on the wall, it's ten after six and this large lump of gristle is sitting on a cot about four feet away, staring balefully at me. You still there?" "I'm not going anyplace." "The lump gets to his feethe's bigger than a linebacker for the Raidersand he moves in on me. I know the type, so do you, one of those muscle-bellied bastards who loves to hit an actor. So I stagger to my feet, fixing to belt him in the bails, which is about as high as I can reach. Hell, I couldn't have reached his jaw on stilts. "He pulls up, his chest in my face. He looks down and says, 'I know you.'" "'I don't think I've had the pleasure,' I tell him." "'Not like personally,' he says. 'What I mean, I seen you in pictures.' And then he says, 'You're pretty good.'" "'Why, thanks.' I'm relieved but not out of the woods yet because he's still looming over me. "He says, 'You know Peggy Ann Garner?'" "I tell him I've met her a couple of times, I don't really know her. "He grins at me like a buddy. He swaggers standing there, no longer a menace. He hitches up his pants and says proudly, 'I fucked her maid.'" A moment of silence. A sigh. Then, "Jesus, you're no help," Jack said accusingly. "Good-bye." "Wait a minute. What happened with the lump of gristle?" "Nothing. It wasn't the beginning of a beautiful friendship, if that's what you mean." "I mean, why would he tell you that story? Just bragging about a conquest?" "It had nothing to do with conquest," Jack said tiredly. "It was his way of telling me that his little act of love, if only by extension, put him in show business." Page 3 Now, Jack's confessional might be dismissed as just another showbiz anecdote, but some years later George C.
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