The model of the perfect play...

  Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, writes that the fairy tale (and, similarly, the Drama) has the capacity to calm, to incite, to assuage, finally, to affect, because we listen to it nonjudgmentally—we identify subconsciously (noncritically) with the protagonist.
    We are allowed to do this, he tells us, because the protagonist and, indeed, the situations are uncharacterized aside from their most essential elements.
    When we are told, for example, that a Handsome Prince went into a wood, we realize that we are that Handsome Prince. As soon as the Prince is characterized, "A Handsome Blond Prince with a twinkle in his eye, and just the hint of a mustache on his upper lip..." and if we lack that color hair, twinkle, and so on, we say, "What an interesting Prince. Of course, he is unlike anyone I know..." and we begin to listen to the story as a critic rather than as a participant.

Radio is a great training ground for dramatists. More than any other dramatic medium it teaches the writer to concentrate on the essentials, because it throws into immediate relief that to characterize the people or scene is to take time from the story—to weaken the story. Working for radio, I learned the way all great drama works: by leaving the endowment of characters, places, and especially action up to the audience. Only by eschewing the desire to characterize can one begin to understand the model of the perfect play.
    The model of the perfect play is the dirty joke.
    "Two guys go into a farmhouse. An old woman is stirring a pot of soup."
    What does the woman look like? What state is the farmhouse in? Why is she stirring soup? It is absolutely not important. The dirty joke-teller is tending toward a punch line and we know that he or she is only going to tell us the elements which direct our attention toward that punch line, so we listen attentively and gratefully.

~David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants, 1986

First posted: 19 April 2013

Book Review: "Bambi vs. Godzilla"

I first encountered David Mamet years ago in his book Make-Believe Town. That contains a collection of reminiscences and essays which ramble across a range of subjects, some of them to do with the movie business. His application of Biblical principles to success at poker being, perhaps, the most surprising element. 
   Since then I have been catching up on Mamet's books, by way of a kind of drip-fed literary diet. The latest has been Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business. 
    In it Mamet references almost two hundred movies, of which I have seen less than half. If you want to know what the term "a broad education" refers to, read a Mamet book.
    In Bambi vs.Godzilla, Mamet addresses many aspects of the film business, with almost half of it given over to a series of observations about the practice of screenwriting. What follows is a short selection of quotes from that book, in no particular order.
________________________________________________________________________

• Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others. 
• Screenwriting ... a plot reducible to five lines on one side of one sheet of paper. 
  
• How does it go? Once upon a time, and then one day, and just when everything was going so well, when just at the last minute, and they all lived happily ever after.
• The filmed drama is a succession of scenes. Each scene must end so that the hero is thwarted in pursuit of his goal—so that he is forced to go on to the next scene to get what he wants. 
• To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions:
  1. Who wants what from whom?
  2. What happens if they don't get it?
  3. Why now?
  
• These magic questions and their worth are not known to any script reader, executive, or producer. They are known and used by few writers. They are, however, part of the unconscious and perpetual understanding of that group who will be judging you and by whose say-so your work will stand or fall: the audience.

As an American occupation, screenwriting has replaced knitting which it, in some ways, resembles; the rules for both are simple, and both involve sheep. —Richard Weisz

• A perfect movie: The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges. ... We may reflect that its description contains none of what the ignorant refer to as "characterization," nor does it contain any of their beloved "backstory." 
• It begins with a premise: the hero wants something.
• He cannot just desire something. For the screenplay to be coherent and compelling, his desire must be awakened by a new circumstance. That circumstance is the film. 
• (In The Lady Eve) Barbara Stanwyck meets the love of her life, Henry Fonda. The film starts because she meets him. The progress of the film is her progress toward the attainment of her goal. When she attains it (in the last ten seconds), the film, the story, is over.
• The audience wanted to know what happened next. That is more or less the total art of the film dramatist: to make the audience want to know what is going to happen next. 
• The garbage of exposition, backstory, narrative, and characterization spot-welds the reader into interest in what is happening now. It literally stops the show. 

Cinema, at its most effective, is one scene effectively  superseded by the next. Isn't that it?  —George Stevens

• The entire practicable sentence was, of course, not "Cut to the chase" but "When in doubt, cut to the chase." Good thinking.
• "Stay with the money." The audience came to see the star. The star is the hero; the drama consists solely in the quest of the hero.
• "You start with a scalpel and you end with a chainsaw." Don't be too nice about cutting the film; throw away everything that's not the story.
• "In the morning you're making Citizen Kane; after lunch you're making The Dukes of Hazzard." At some point you're going to start running out of time. Plan your time by sticking to the essential story. You're going to cut everything else anyway.
  
• The various limitless seminars in filmmaking dotting our coasts and making increasingly making inroads upon the hinterland ... have little to do with the actual making of movies.
  
• When you get a great script done with great actors, then you have a classic.
• The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest—these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed, logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable.
  

A guy comes home from college to find his mother sleeping with his uncle, and there's a ghost running around. Write it good, it's Hamlet; write it bad, it's Gilligan's Island. —Lorne Michaels

• The rule, then, in filmmaking, as in storytelling, is "leave out the adjectives."
• One really doesn't start to learn how to write a script until one has been on a set—on the set one learns the difference between what is filmable and what is merely pretty words. ("Outside the window, New York—in all its vicious splendor" is charming verbiage and all that, but, script-in-hand, on location, its director is going to be hard-pressed to learn from the script where to put the camera.)
• Dramatic structure consists of the creation and deferment of hope. That's basically all it is. 
• What keeps them apart? (Billy Wilder) The engine of a love story is not what attracts them—we know that: they're young and pretty. The work should go into the construction of the plausible opposition to their union. 
• The language of the modern screenplay is like that of the personals column. The descriptions of the protagonist and the lovelorn aspirant are one: beautiful, smart, funny, likes long walks and dogs, affectionate, kind, honest, sexy. These descriptions, increasingly, are the content of the screenplay—replacing dialogue and camera angles, the only two aspects of a screenplay actually of use.
• "Smash, bash, crash: the world becomes a steel cauldron of pain." "Yes," says the young script reader. "Yes. Hot stuff indeed. Boss? This is hot stuff. This person knows how to write action."
     "Loves hazy afternoons. This well-educated beauty finds loveliness all around her. Perhaps you do, too...?"

First posted: 20 August 2012

TV Writing Masterclass - David Mamet

David Mamet created a TV series called The Unit, which ran from 2006 to 2009 on CBS. As part of the process, writers were hired, some seventeen of them over the duration, not counting Mamet himself.

Note: "The Unit" is a euphemism that parallels the term "The Company." The latter relates to C.I.A., the former to Delta Force.

In 2005, David Mamet dashed off a memo to his writers. This document circulated through writing circles for years. It is rumored to have first been publicized by Ink Canada, but that is unconfirmed. I do know that the memo was published in 2010, the year after the show was cancelled, by Seth Abramovitch on MovieLine. It has been referenced by many others since. 

One of the characteristics of the memo is that the entire document was written in upper case. Yeah, UPPER CASE. WE CALL THAT "SHOUTING" AND IT IS BLOODY HARD TO READ. If you've ever seen a David Mamet screenplay, you'll know he writes them largely in upper case as well. Anyway, for the ease of readers, I went through the text and took the liberty of converting it into a more readable format. The choice of which words to emphasize in bold is all Mamet's.

_______________________________________________________________________

To the writers of The Unit

Greetings.

As we learn how to write this show, a recurring problem becomes clear. The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. 

Let me break-it-down now. Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time. Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information—and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn't, I wouldn't. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: What is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.

1) Who wants what?

2) What happens if he don't get it?

3) Why now?

The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not. If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted.

There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene after it leaves your typewriter. You, the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.

This means all the "little" expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actor's job (the actor's job is to be truthful). It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. 

It is your job.

Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene. This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure—this is how (we know) the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.

All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.

Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and stand alone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.

Yes but yes but yes but, you say: What about the necessity of writing in all that "information?"

And I respond, “Figure it out.” Any dickhead with a blue suit can be (and is) taught to say "Make it clearer", and "I want to know more about him".

When you've made it so clear that even this blue-suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to suggest to them what happens next.

Any dickhead, as above, can write, “But, Jim, if we don't assassinate the Prime Minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flame.”

We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us, such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.

Yes but, yes but yes but, you reiterate.

And I respond, Figure it out.

How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in their blue suits.

Figure it out.

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: The scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.

Look at your log lines. Any logline reading “Bob and Sue discuss...” is not describing a dramatic scene.

Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.

Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.

Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit. Any time any character is saying to another, “As you know,” that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air and hire someone to live there for you.

Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing? Literally. What are they handling, what are they reading? What are they watching on television, what are they seeing?

If you pretend the characters can’t speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.

If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech, you will be forced to work in a new medium—telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting). This is a new skill. No one does it naturally. You can train yourselves to do it, but you need to start.

I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself, “Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?”

Answer truthfully.

If the answer is “no,” write it again or throw it out. If you've got any questions, call me up.

Love, Dave Mamet

Santa Monica 19 October 05

(It is not your responsibility to know the answers, but it is your, and my, responsibility to know and to ask the right questions over and over. Until it becomes second nature. I believe they are listed above.)

_______________________________________________________________________

Anyone who has read David Mamet's book, On Directing Film, will recognize most of the material in this memo.

16 July 2012

Book review: "On Directing Film"

The book, On Directing Film by David Mamet, was recommended to me by Brian McDonald. He said: 

It is ostensibly about directing, but it’s really about telling stories with pictures. This is a thing that most screenwriters have almost no idea how to do. Most screenwriters write radio plays, not screenplays. This is a visual medium. Learn to use the pictures.

It's a small book, just over 100 pages in paperback. The focus is on the weakness of most wannabe screenwriters—how to tell stories with pictures.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal.

The point, as Aristotle told us, is what happens to the hero... not what happens to the writer.

House of Games (1987)

Screenwriting is a craft based on logic, It consists of the assiduous application of several very basic questions: What does the hero want? What hinders him from getting it? What happens if he does not get it? 

We don't have to worry about creating a problem. We make a better movie if we worry about restoring order. Because if we worry about creating problems, our protagonist is going to do things that are interesting. We don't want him to do that. We want him to do things that are logical.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

If you listen to the way people tell stories, you will hear that they tell them cinematically. They jump from one thing to the next, and the story is moved along by the juxtaposition of images—which is to say, by the cut.
   People say, "I'm standing on the corner. It's a foggy day. A bunch of people are running around crazy. Might have been the full moon. All of a sudden, a car comes up and the guy next to me says..."
   If you think about it, that's a shot list: (1) a guy standing on the corner; (2) shot of fog; (3) a full moon shining above; (4) a man says, "I think people get whacky this time of year"; (5) a car approaching.
   This is good filmmaking, to juxtapose images. Now you're following the story. What, you wonder, is going to happen next.

State and Main (2000)

The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script. The work on the set is nothing. All you have to do on the set is stay awake, follow your plans, help the actors be simple, and keep your sense of humor. The film is directed in the making of the shot list. The work on the set is simply to record what has been chosen to be recorded. It is the plan that makes the movie.

We can identify with the pursuit of a goal. It's much easier to identify with that than with "character traits."

Wag the Dog (1997)

Always do things the least interesting way, and you will make a better movie. This is my experience. Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way. Because then you will not stand the risk of falling afoul of the objective in the scene by being interesting, which will always bore the audience, who are collectively much smarter than you and me and have already gotten up to the punch line. How do we keep their attention? Certainly not by giving them more information but, on the contrary, by withholding information—by withholding all information except that information the absence of which would make the progress of the story incomprehensible.

Heist (2001)

You tell the story. Don't let the protagonist tell the story. You tell the story; you direct it. We don't have to follow the protagonist around. We don't have to establish his "character." We don't need to have anybody's "back story."

If you are telling a story, then the human mind, as it's working along with you, is perceiving your thrust, both consciously and, more importantly, subconsciously. The audience members are going to go along with that story and will require neither inducement, in the form of visual extravagance, nor explanation, in the form of narration.
   They want to see what's happening next. Is the guy going to get killed? Is the girl going to kiss him? Will they find the money buried in the old gold mine?
   When the film is correctly designed, the subconscious and conscious are in alignment, and we need to hear what happens next. The audience is ordering the events just as the author did, so we are in touch with both his conscious and his unconscious mind. We have become involved in the story.

On Directing Film is practical, provocative, cheap to buy, easy to read. Don't miss it.

First posted:  28 April 2012

I didn't go to film school...

Let's get the shameful confession out of the way first. I didn't go to film school. 
So what? you ask. The issue came up recently in a reported comment, supposedly made by Terry Gilliam: "Film school is for fools." He did say:

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made. 

George Lucas went to film school, and he's done okay. Mind you, James Cameron didn't, and his movies out-gross, well, everybody's. Martin Scorsese went to film school. Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, Bernardo Bertolucci, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfred Hitchcock did not.

David Mamet didn't go to film school, either. He wrote copy for a girlie magazine instead, learning to combine words with pictures.

I would be given "the blues," blue-and-grey first runs of what would later be glorious color spreads of the said naked women, and I would tack them on the cork-lined walls, and I would strive to have fantasies about them. For it was all a fiction, all that stuff; their names were made-up, their biographies, their likes and peeves. It was whole cloth, like the letters to the editor. Someone made it up, and that year, that was my job.

   I think my personal best was "Katya with her pants down"; and there was also "Anna is a palindrome," but I'm not sure if that was mine.

                                                — David Mamet, Make-Believe Town, 1996

The regular reader will have observed I'm fond of David Mamet, partly for the truth of this observation of his:

Working as a screenwriter, I always thought that 'Film is a collaborative business' only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter's point-of-view, the correct rendering should be 'Film is a collaborative business: bend over.'

But that's a digression.

Not only did he not go there, but Mamet questions the value of anyone going to film school.

Of what use is this graduate film diploma, then? As evidence of the bona fides of the applicant. For someone capable of putting up with X years of the nonsense of school would be odds-on willing to submit to the sit-down-and-shut-up rigors of the bureaucratic environment.
                                — David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla, 2008

Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City, Spy Kids, El Mariachi and a bunch others, has this advice about film school.

If you want to be a filmmaker and you can’t afford film school, know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to learn your own way of doing things.        
                         — Robert Rodriguez, Rebel without a Crew,1996

Werner Herzog has been quite vocal in arguing against film school. 

You don't need to go to film school. You can learn the technical things in less than a week. All the rest you can learn by traveling on foot. You have to have fundamental experiences in life, like solitude. You have to experience it to know what it means.

I asked Brian McDonald what he thought about the line: "Film school is for fools."

That sounds kinda harsh. But there is something weird about film school. None of the old masters of film went to film school because such a thing did not exist. For example, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, William Wellman, William Wyler, David Lean, Victor Fleming, George Stevens, Charlie Chaplin, Leo McCarey, Elia Kazan, Orson Wells, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh never went to film school. Those are all directors, but I could list as many screenwriters, editors, and other crafts people who did not get their film education in schools. 
   I didn’t go. Many of my friends who did go say they felt it was a waste of time in most respects. There are often some basic storytelling concepts they are either not taught or not taught well. I think basic skills of communication are sometimes seen as pedestrian in academic circles, so they favor the avant-garde.

   I’m not telling anyone not to go the film school, but to understand that your school may not be making you familiar with all the things that might help you become an effective communicator in the film medium. It will still be your job to seek those things out. Storytelling is not something you can ever fully master. To be good at it you have to have a ravenous appetite for information about your craft.

For every case against, there will always be one for. In this instance, it comes in the form of a book from Steve Boman—Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World's Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS. 

You can read a review of that book by Jonathon Zimmerman (who himself went to film school and has things to say on the subject) in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

First posted:  3 February 2012

The model of the perfect play...

  Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, writes that the fairy tale (and, similarly, the Drama) has the capacity to calm, to incite, to assuage, finally, to affect, because we listen to it nonjudgmentally—we identify subconsciously (noncritically) with the protagonist.
    We are allowed to do this, he tells us, because the protagonist and, indeed, the situations are uncharacterized aside from their most essential elements.
    When we are told, for example, that a Handsome Prince went into a wood, we realize that we are that Handsome Prince. As soon as the Prince is characterized, "A Handsome Blond Prince with a twinkle in his eye, and just the hint of a mustache on his upper lip..." and if we lack that color hair, twinkle, and so on, we say, "What an interesting Prince. Of course, he is unlike anyone     I know..." and we begin to listen to the story as a critic rather than as a participant.

Radio is a great training ground for dramatists. More than any other dramatic medium it teaches the writer to concentrate on the essentials, because it throws into immediate relief that to characterize the people or scene is to take time from the story—to weaken the story. Working for radio, I learned the way all great drama works: by leaving the endowment of characters, places, and especially action up to the audience. Only by eschewing the desire to characterize can one begin to understand the model of the perfect play.
    The model of the perfect play is the dirty joke.
    "Two guys go into a farmhouse. An old woman is stirring a pot of soup."
    What does the woman look like? What state is the farmhouse in? Why is she stirring soup? It is absolutely not important. The dirty joke-teller is tending toward a punch line and we know that he or she is only going to tell us the elements which direct our attention toward that punch line, so we listen attentively and gratefully.

~David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants, 1986

Book Review: "Bambi vs. Godzilla"

I first encountered David Mamet years ago in his book Make-Believe Town. That contains a collection of reminiscences and essays which ramble across a range of subjects, some of them to do with the movie business. His application of Biblical principles to success at poker being, perhaps, the most surprising element. 
   Since then I have been catching up on Mamet's books, by way of a kind of drip-fed literary diet. The latest has been Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business. 
    In it Mamet references almost two hundred movies, of which I have seen less than half. If you want to know what the term "a broad education" refers to, read a Mamet book.
    In Bambi vs.Godzilla, Mamet addresses many aspects of the film business, with almost half of it given over to a series of observations about the practice of screenwriting. What follows is a short selection of quotes from that book, in no particular order.
________________________________________________________________________

• Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others. 
• Screenwriting ... a plot reducible to five lines on one side of one sheet of paper. 
  
• How does it go? Once upon a time, and then one day, and just when everything was going so well, when just at the last minute, and they all lived happily ever after.
• The filmed drama is a succession of scenes. Each scene must end so that the hero is thwarted in pursuit of his goal—so that he is forced to go on to the next scene to get what he wants. 
• To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions:
  1. Who wants what from whom?
  2. What happens if they don't get it?
  3. Why now?
  
• These magic questions and their worth are not known to any script reader, executive, or producer. They are known and used by few writers. They are, however, part of the unconscious and perpetual understanding of that group who will be judging you and by whose say-so your work will stand or fall: the audience.

As an American occupation, screenwriting has replaced knitting which it, in some ways, resembles; the rules for both are simple, and both involve sheep. —Richard Weisz

• A perfect movie: The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges. ... We may reflect that its description contains none of what the ignorant refer to as "characterization," nor does it contain any of their beloved "backstory." 
• It begins with a premise: the hero wants something.
• He cannot just desire something. For the screenplay to be coherent and compelling, his desire must be awakened by a new circumstance. That circumstance is the film. 
• (In The Lady Eve) Barbara Stanwyck meets the love of her life, Henry Fonda. The film starts because she meets him. The progress of the film is her progress toward the attainment of her goal. When she attains it (in the last ten seconds), the film, the story, is over.
• The audience wanted to know what happened next. That is more or less the total art of the film dramatist: to make the audience want to know what is going to happen next. 
• The garbage of exposition, backstory, narrative, and characterization spot-welds the reader into interest in what is happening now. It literally stops the show. 

Cinema, at its most effective, is one scene effectively  superseded by the next. Isn't that it?  —George Stevens

• The entire practicable sentence was, of course, not "Cut to the chase" but "When in doubt, cut to the chase." Good thinking.
• "Stay with the money." The audience came to see the star. The star is the hero; the drama consists solely in the quest of the hero.
• "You start with a scalpel and you end with a chainsaw." Don't be too nice about cutting the film; throw away everything that's not the story.
• "In the morning you're making Citizen Kane; after lunch you're making The Dukes of Hazzard." At some point you're going to start running out of time. Plan your time by sticking to the essential story. You're going to cut everything else anyway.
  
• The various limitless seminars in filmmaking dotting our coasts and making increasingly making inroads upon the hinterland ... have little to do with the actual making of movies.
  
• When you get a great script done with great actors, then you have a classic.
• The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest—these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed, logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable.
  

A guy comes home from college to find his mother sleeping with his uncle, and there's a ghost running around. Write it good, it's Hamlet; write it bad, it's Gilligan's Island. —Lorne Michaels

• The rule, then, in filmmaking, as in storytelling, is "leave out the adjectives."
• One really doesn't start to learn how to write a script until one has been on a set—on the set one learns the difference between what is filmable and what is merely pretty words. ("Outside the window, New York—in all its vicious splendor" is charming verbiage and all that, but, script-in-hand, on location, its director is going to be hard-pressed to learn from the script where to put the camera.)
• Dramatic structure consists of the creation and deferment of hope. That's basically all it is. 
• What keeps them apart? (Billy Wilder) The engine of a love story is not what attracts them—we know that: they're young and pretty. The work should go into the construction of the plausible opposition to their union. 
• The language of the modern screenplay is like that of the personals column. The descriptions of the protagonist and the lovelorn aspirant are one: beautiful, smart, funny, likes long walks and dogs, affectionate, kind, honest, sexy. These descriptions, increasingly, are the content of the screenplay—replacing dialogue and camera angles, the only two aspects of a screenplay actually of use.
• "Smash, bash, crash: the world becomes a steel cauldron of pain." "Yes," says the young script reader. "Yes. Hot stuff indeed. Boss? This is hot stuff. This person knows how to write action."
     "Loves hazy afternoons. This well-educated beauty finds loveliness all around her. Perhaps you do, too...?"

TV Writing Masterclass - David Mamet

David Mamet created a TV series called The Unit, which ran from 2006 to 2009 on CBS. As part of the process, writers were hired, some seventeen of them over the duration, not counting Mamet himself.

Note: "The Unit" is a euphemism that parallels the term "The Company." The latter relates to C.I.A., the former to Delta Force.

In 2005, David Mamet dashed off a memo to his writers. This document circulated through writing circles for years. It is rumored to have first been publicized by Ink Canada, but that is unconfirmed. I do know that the memo was published in 2010, the year after the show was cancelled, by Seth Abramovitch on MovieLine. It has been referenced by many others since. 

One of the characteristics of the memo is that the entire document was written in upper case. Yeah, UPPER CASE. WE CALL THAT "SHOUTING" AND IT IS BLOODY HARD TO READ. If you've ever seen a David Mamet screenplay, you'll know he writes them largely in upper case as well. Anyway, for the ease of readers, I went through the text and took the liberty of converting it into a more readable format. The choice of which words to emphasize in bold is all Mamet's.

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To the writers of The Unit

Greetings.

As we learn how to write this show, a recurring problem becomes clear. The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. 

Let me break-it-down now. Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time. Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information—and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn't, I wouldn't. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: What is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.

1) Who wants what?

2) What happens if he don't get it?

3) Why now?

The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not. If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted.

There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene after it leaves your typewriter. You, the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.

This means all the "little" expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actor's job (the actors job is to be truthful). It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. 

It is your job.

Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene. This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure—this is how (we know) the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.

All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.

Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and stand alone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.

Yes but yes but yes but, you say: What about the necessity of writing in all that "information?"

And I respond, “Figure it out.” Any dickhead with a blue suit can be (and is) taught to say "Make it clearer", and "I want to know more about him".

When you've made it so clear that even this blue-suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to suggest to them what happens next.

Any dickhead, as above, can write, “But, Jim, if we don't assassinate the Prime Minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flame.”

We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us, such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.

Yes but, yes but yes but, you reiterate.

And I respond, Figure it out.

How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in their blue suits.

Figure it out.

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: The scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.

Look at your log lines. Any logline reading “Bob and Sue discuss...” is not describing a dramatic scene.

Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.

Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.

Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit. Any time any character is saying to another, “As you know,” that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air and hire someone to live there for you.

Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing? Literally. What are they handling, what are they reading? What are they watching on television, what are they seeing?

If you pretend the characters can’t speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.

If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech, you will be forced to work in a new medium—telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting). This is a new skill. No one does it naturally. You can train yourselves to do it, but you need to start.

I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself, “Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?”

Answer truthfully.

If the answer is “no,” write it again or throw it out. If you've got any questions, call me up.

Love, Dave Mamet

Santa Monica 19 October 05

(It is not your responsibility to know the answers, but it is your, and my, responsibility to know and to ask the right questions over and over. Until it becomes second nature. I believe they are listed above.)

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Anyone who has read David Mamet's book, On Directing Film, will recognize most of the material in this memo.