Sam Peckinpah: Visual Metaphor, Theme and Story Structure

Syd Field wrote Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting back in 1979. The book deals with screenplay structure, but also shares many anecdotes about key Hollywood figures. 

Syd Field was born and grew up in L.A. He was an extra in a Frank Capra movie at the age of 10. He attended Hollywood High School. One of his best friends knew James Dean; their high school gang became models for the gang in Rebel Without a Cause. 

When I first read some of the details of his early life, it put me in mind of a quote from Terry Rossio's WordPlay, a quote that intimidated me for years:

At age 21, George Lucas was hanging out with Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. Who are you hanging out with?

The following excerpts are from Chapter 4 (Building a Character) and Chapter 11 (The Sequence) of Syd Field's book:

When I first began writing screenplays, I had the good fortune of hanging out with Sam Peckinpah during the time he was writing The Wild Bunch. His niece, Deneen Peckinpah, and I had both worked with Jean Renoir on the world premiere of his play Carola when we were students at UC Berkeley. When she came to L.A. seeking an acting career, she stayed with Sam at the beach.

Sam was amazing—brilliant in his visual awareness, talkative when he felt comfortable, and, of course, moody and self-destructive when he was drinking too much or thought someone had gone behind his back or broken their word to him.

One of the things I like most about Sam Peckinpah as a filmmaker is the way he designs his sequences in what I call "the contradiction of image." Things we don't expect begin to play upon and affect the central core of the action.

The Wild Bunch opens with the outlaws, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), wearing soldier uniforms and riding into a small town. They pass a group of kids setting fire to a scorpion, a little visual aside to what's about to come. [Actually, when they ride into town several scorpions are being overrun by angry ants. When the gang escape after the robbery, we see the kids setting the scorpions on fire. So there are two visual metaphors here: the people (in the form of the bounty hunters) rising up against the gang, and the final pyrrhic victory of their shootout with the Mexicans.]

When the Wild Bunch rides into town, they pass a preacher standing underneath a tent, denouncing the evils of alcohol. In almost every Peckinpah film, there is some kind of reference to the evils of alcohol.

Pike's character reveals his sympathetic side immediately; as the group prepares to enter the bank, he inadvertently bumps into a little old lady and knocks her parcels to the ground. Everybody freezes, but with the decorum of a gentleman, Pike picks up the packages, extends his arm, and helps the lady across the street.

The bank robbery does more than just set up for an action sequence. Peckinpah sets up his characters and situations in order to illustrate his theme, which is "unchanged men in a changing land." The relationship between the two main characters, Pike and Dutch, is established immediately. In the first scene we see they've ridden together, stood by each other, and fought each other; they have a history between them. They know that the days of robbing banks and railroads are "closing fast," and they're locked into a dead-end future where the only alternatives are death, prison, or living out a meager kind of existence in a small Mexican village.

Late one afternoon, after Sam had finished his day's writing on The Wild Bunch, we were enjoying a beer and watching the sunset when I asked how he structured his stories. He paused for a moment, then told me he liked to "hang" his stories around a centerpiece. Typically, he said, he would build the action up to a certain event, about midway through the story, then let everything else be the result of that event.

In The Wild Bunch it is the train robbery, done in almost total silence. It's a magnificent sequence; once he sets up the story and the characters, everything leads to the train robbery and the rest of the movie unfolds as a result of that sequence.

First posted: 12 August 2013

A story told with pictures

Syd Field wrote Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting back in 1979. The book enjoyed enormous success, but became a bit of a target for critics in later years.

Whatever you think of the argument over Three-Act Structure, Syd Field's book is a good read and has many helpful things things to say.

The following excerpt (from Chapter 3, The Creation of Character) illustrates the maxim about using pictures to tell a story.

My favorite film marriage is seen in Citizen Kane. Kane's marriage is revealed in one incredible sequence, which begins with the marriage and honeymoon of Kane and his first wife. In the next cut, we see them at breakfast having an intimate conversation.

There is a swish pan (the camera swishes quickly out of the frame) and we see them in different clothes talking and reading the paper at breakfast. Swish pan and we see them at a slightly larger table having a very heated discussion. Swish pan to them having a more vocal argument about his spending so much time at his newspaper.

Swish pan to them at a much larger table, both silent, both reading the paper, he reading The Inquirer, she reading the Post [actually, the  Chronicle], his primary competitor. She asks him something and he simply grunts in reply.

Swish pan to them at a very long table eating in total silence. A significant period of time covered in about a minute [just over two minutes, actually]. The sequence tells us so much about their relationship, and it's all done in brief shots, using pictures instead of words. A screenplay, remember, is a story told with pictures.

---

The book contains a number of small factual errors, but keep in mind that Syd Field was writing this in 1979, when he didn't have the benefit of DVDs. I assume he wrote his description of the scene from memory. The screenplay for Citizen Kane has none of this. It restricts the elements to two sentences in a single scene.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE ENQUIRER BUILDING - DAY

High angle downward - what Bernstein and Miss Townsend see from the window.

Kane is just stepping into an elegant barouch, drawn up at the curb, in which sits Miss Emily Norton. He kisses her full on the lips before he sits down.  She acts a bit taken aback, because of the public nature of the scene, but she isn't really annoyed.  As the barouche starts off, she is looking at him adoringly.  He, however, has turned his head and is looking adoringly at the "Enquirer."  He apparently sees Bernstein and Miss Townsend and waves his hand.

I think Orson Welles improved on the screenplay (which he co-wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz) in this scene, but I wonder if it was a sudden inspiration at the last minute or a disagreement with Mankiewicz, which Welles, as director, decided in his own favor.

First posted: 5 August 2013

The Act II metaphor

One of the many 'expert' books on the subject of screenwriting is Viki King's How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method. It focuses on getting you to push through and write a first draft of a script (no matter how rough), but it also teaches a formula which is based firmly on Syd Field's 3-Act theory. I suspect her method works best for highly visual people.

 
The book's one original contribution to the subject of screenwriting is her reference to something she calls 'the Act II metaphor.'  "This is usually a small scene with symbolic overtones... (which) ... gives us a clue to the resolution." King is rigid about the place where this scene occurs in the script—page 45 (in a 120 page script)—"the start of your character's growth."

  
I spent some time recently contemplating confrontation scenes in movies. One of the films I looked at was You've Got Mail, and I was interested to see that the major confrontation scene in the movie includes an Act II metaphor. 

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are business competitors. He runs a giant discount book sellers chain; she runs a tiny specialist children's bookshop. When he opens a new store in her neighborhood, she is threatened with extinction.

Tom Hanks scoops up the caviar..

They run into one another at a P.E.N. dinner, where his actions mirror his business position—he scoops up all the caviar garnish on a salmon mousse. This symbolises the threat he poses: he is going to scoop up all of her business. Her response is to take the caviar back, which represents what she will do by the end of the movie: she will lose her shop, but will take it all back, by capturing his heart.

... and Meg Ryan takes it all back.

Watch the movie sometime, it's a good one. 

Just for the record, the event occurs 37 minutes into a 115 minute movie. That's 32%, not the 37% suggested by Viki King's page-45-out-of-120-pages, but who's to quibble?

First posted: 25 September 2011

P.S.:  There is a Bollywood movie around which contains many of the elements of You've Got Mail, but with a different ending to the story, called The Lunchbox. It's set in Mumbai and draws on practices unknown elsewhere in the world. (There are no dance scenes in it either, believe it or not.) All round, an interesting film.

Syd Field: 1935-2013

Syd Field died on Sunday, November 17 of hemolytic anemia at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 77. Field was supposed to attend the Raindance Film Festival last week.

Born on December 19, 1935 in Hollywood, California, Syd Field received his B.A. in English Literature at University of California, Berkeley in 1960.

Field was the author of eight best-selling books on screenwriting. The first of these, Screenplay was initially published in 1979. It has been published in 23 languages and is used in over 400 colleges and universities around the world.

In addition to teaching classes, Field served as a consultant to all of Hollywood’s major studios at one time or another.

Amazon.com    Facebook    IMDb    Website    Wikipedia

Sam Peckinpah: Visual Metaphor, Theme and Story Structure

Syd Field wrote Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting back in 1979. The book deals with screenplay structure, but also shares many anecdotes about key Hollywood figures. 

Syd Field was born and grew up in L.A. He was an extra in a Frank Capra movie at the age of 10. He attended Hollywood High School. One of his best friends knew James Dean; their high school gang became models for the gang in Rebel Without a Cause. 

When I first read some of the details of his early life, it put me in mind of a quote from Terry Rossio's WordPlay, a quote that intimidated me for years:

At age 21, George Lucas was hanging out with Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. Who are you hanging out with?

The following excerpts are from Chapter 4 (Building a Character) and Chapter 11 (The Sequence) of Syd Field's book:

When I first began writing screenplays, I had the good fortune of hanging out with Sam Peckinpah during the time he was writing The Wild Bunch. His niece, Deneen Peckinpah, and I had both worked with Jean Renoir on the world premiere of his play Carola when we were students at UC Berkeley. When she came to L.A. seeking an acting career, she stayed with Sam at the beach.

Sam was amazing—brilliant in his visual awareness, talkative when he felt comfortable, and, of course, moody and self-destructive when he was drinking too much or thought someone had gone behind his back or broken their word to him.

One of the things I like most about Sam Peckinpah as a filmmaker is the way he designs his sequences in what I call "the contradiction of image." Things we don't expect begin to play upon and affect the central core of the action.

The Wild Bunch opens with the outlaws, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), wearing soldier uniforms and riding into a small town. They pass a group of kids setting fire to a scorpion, a little visual aside to what's about to come. [Actually, when they ride into town several scorpions are being overrun by angry ants. When the gang escape after the robbery, we see the kids setting the scorpions on fire. So there are two visual metaphors here: the people (in the form of the bounty hunters) rising up against the gang, and the final pyrrhic victory of their shootout with the Mexicans.]

When the Wild Bunch rides into town, they pass a preacher standing underneath a tent, denouncing the evils of alcohol. In almost every Peckinpah film, there is some kind of reference to the evils of alcohol.

Pike's character reveals his sympathetic side immediately; as the group prepares to enter the bank, he inadvertently bumps into a little old lady and knocks her parcels to the ground. Everybody freezes, but with the decorum of a gentleman, Pike picks up the packages, extends his arm, and helps the lady across the street.

The bank robbery does more than just set up for an action sequence. Peckinpah sets up his characters and situations in order to illustrate his theme, which is "unchanged men in a changing land." The relationship between the two main characters, Pike and Dutch, is established immediately. In the first scene we see they've ridden together, stood by each other, and fought each other; they have a history between them. They know that the days of robbing banks and railroads are "closing fast," and they're locked into a dead-end future where the only alternatives are death, prison, or living out a meager kind of existence in a small Mexican village.

Late one afternoon, after Sam had finished his day's writing on The Wild Bunch, we were enjoying a beer and watching the sunset when I asked how he structured his stories. He paused for a moment, then told me he liked to "hang" his stories around a centerpiece. Typically, he said, he would build the action up to a certain event, about midway through the story, then let everything else be the result of that event.

In The Wild Bunch it is the train robbery, done in almost total silence. It's a magnificent sequence; once he sets up the story and the characters, everything leads to the train robbery and the rest of the movie unfolds as a result of that sequence.

A story told with pictures

Syd Field wrote Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting back in 1979. The book enjoyed enormous success, but became a bit of a target for critics in later years.

Whatever you think of the argument over Three-Act Structure, Syd Field's book is a good read and has many helpful things things to say.

The following excerpt (from Chapter 3, The Creation of Character) illustrates the maxim about using pictures to tell a story.

My favorite film marriage is seen in Citizen Kane. Kane's marriage is revealed in one incredible sequence, which begins with the marriage and honeymoon of Kane and his first wife. In the next cut, we see them at breakfast having an intimate conversation.

There is a swish pan (the camera swishes quickly out of the frame) and we see them in different clothes talking and reading the paper at breakfast. Swish pan and we see them at a slightly larger table having a very heated discussion. Swish pan to them having a more vocal argument about his spending so much time at his newspaper.

Swish pan to them at a much larger table, both silent, both reading the paper, he reading The Inquirer, she reading the Post [actually, the  Chronicle], his primary competitor. She asks him something and he simply grunts in reply.

Swish pan to them at a very long table eating in total silence. A significant period of time covered in about a minute [just over two minutes, actually]. The sequence tells us so much about their relationship, and it's all done in brief shots, using pictures instead of words. A screenplay, remember, is a story told with pictures.

________________________________________________________________________

The book contains a number of small factual errors, but keep in mind that Syd Field was writing this in 1979, when he didn't have the benefit of DVDs. I assume he wrote his description of the scene from memory. The screenplay for Citizen Kane has none of this. It restricts the elements to two sentences in a single scene.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE ENQUIRER BUILDING - DAY

High angle downward - what Bernstein and Miss Townsend see from the window.

Kane is just stepping into an elegant barouch, drawn up at the curb, in which sits Miss Emily Norton. He kisses her full on the lips before he sits down.  She acts a bit taken aback, because of the public nature of the scene, but she isn't really annoyed.  As the barouche starts off, she is looking at him adoringly.  He, however, has turned his head and is looking adoringly at the "Enquirer."  He apparently sees Bernstein and Miss Townsend and waves his hand.

I think Orson Welles improved on the screenplay (which he co-wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz) in this scene, but I wonder if it was a sudden inspiration at the last minute or a disagreement with Mankiewicz, which Welles, as director, decided in his own favor.

Three-act structure?

It was laid out for the general public in Syd Field's book Screenplay and, like most aspiring screenwriters, I ran into three-act theory early on.

To be honest, I couldn't see it at all. 

I read Linda Seger's book, Making a Good Script Great, which repeats Field's demand that a screenplay consist of 120 pages, divided into thirty pages of act 1, sixty pages of act 2, and thirty pages of act 3. 

Then she talked about a Midpoint, which divides act 2 into 2A and 2B. I thought, "Doesn't that make for a four-act structure?"  But things got worse, because the Midpoint scene can be stretched out into a sequence or, dare I say it, an Act in its own right, giving us a five act structure.

Oh, and by the way, don't most of Shakespeare's plays consist of five acts? 

An opening frame from the Irish movie, The Actors.

Some movies publish the fact that they were designed as a five-act play. One such is the Michael Caine movie, The Actors (2006). [Good movie, a personal favourite. Check it out.] The fact is explicitly stated on a screen which says, A Film In Five Acts... Then each act is introduced with its own title card.

Click on this page

In the old days, movies were written with an explicit five-act structure. You don't need to be some kind of genius to know that; it was shown clearly on the page. If you look at the scripts of some of the great movies from the 1940s and '50s, such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Sunset Blvd. (1950), you will see that the scenes aren't numbered 1, 2, 3, etc., but rather A-1, A-2, A-3, and so on. A=Act 1. The scenes in Act 2 are numbered B-1, B-2, B-3, etc. And on and on up to scenes numbered E-1, E-2, E-3, etc.

'A' to 'E', that's FIVE acts. (I've included a page sample from Double Indemnity to the right,)

To this day, both Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter have the capacity to label scenes with that same alpha-numeric designation. 

In addition to these complications, there are also the made-for-television movies, known as "Movie Of the Week" (MOW) in the US. They consist of seven acts (the commercial breaks are written into the screenplay). 

The bulk of the gurus tramping the I'll-teach-you-how-to-to-write-a-hit-movie circuit (who have, themselves, never written a hit movie) talk about three-act structure. Occasionally you will come across a commentator who tells a different story. One such is John Truby. In his book, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, he says: 

"... three act structure, albeit a lot easier to understand than Aristotle, is hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong. ... Three-act structure is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic—where the story should or should not go."

Another is William Froug. Read his book Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade. He says:

It is not valuable to recommend that new screenwriters write by the numbers.

He goes on to tell the following story.

I attended a seminar of "Film and Literature" at Key West this past winter. One of the panelists remarked, surprisingly, that all movie stories are told in three acts, to which fellow-panelist screenwriter William Goldman replied, "Really? I didn't know that." I began to think of three of Goldman's best screenplays: Marathon Man (based on his novel), A Bridge Too Far, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. None of them follow the conventional three act structure.

William Froug adds a quote from Daniel Pyne, writer of numerous TV shows and feature films:

I completely eschew the formula of first, second, and third acts. I've run into too many writers who get lost in that old formula. They know where the first act ends, and they know where the second act ends, but their entire script is treading water because they're just writing from point to point.

Howard Suber well said: With regard to any specific movie, everyone will agree on where the first act begins and where the third act ends, but there is often no agreement about where the second act begins and ends—even among the people who make the film.

In his book Hollywood Animal, Joe Eszterhas explains how he wrote the movie Basic Instinct. 

I had written ... movies where men manipulated the women who loved them. I thought it would be fun to flip the dynamic: to do a movie about a man being manipulated by a woman who is brilliant, omnisexual and evil. ... The piece wrote itself. I improvised all the way through. I made no notes for myself, no outline. I simply put the things down which the characters said to me. Three weeks from the time I started thinking about it, I finished the piece.

Basic Instinct is not structured with three acts. Instead it is a narrative punctuated by reference to books: the one Catherine wrote describing the murder; the one she wrote about the boy killing his parents "to see if he could get away with it"; the one she is writing, which when finished results in her telling Nick it's all over; and the one Nick says he's writing, with its impossibly happy ending, which will guarantee his eventual demise at Catherine's hands.

Howard Suber wrote in The Power of Film:

There are those who claim that a film must have a three-act structure, and they often claim that Aristotle gave this "rule" to us. In fact, there were no acts as we define the term today in Greek drama, and Aristotle did not talk about acts at all because the plays he analyzed were all presented in a single continuous performance.

The three-act structure that so many people ascribe to Aristotle was, in fact, invented more than two thousand years later when Ibsen and other nineteenth-century dramatists found that their audiences—unlike the drama groupies of Periclean Athens—were unable to sit still for the entire duration of a full-length play.

A movie has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and eventually finish. As Jean-Luc Goddard famously said, A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But not necessarily in that order. Structure is necessary and good, but beware of approaching it from a fixed POV. 

Jokes have structure, but only one rule: the punchline comes last. The rest can be told in whatever order suits you, but once the punchline appears anywhere but at the end, it stops being a joke and becomes something else. One of the best illustrations of this fact is the documentary The Aristocrats (2005), which consists of a hundred comedians telling just one joke. They tell it in a hundred different ways, but the punchline stays the same, and it always comes at the end. (I have to warn you it should be R-rated for the language.) 

I think every wannabe screenwriter should study the various theories of structure until they understand them, then they should set it all aside and focus on writing their story the best way they can. The problem with embracing three-act structure as an article of faith is that you end up being able to see only what you expect to see, rather than what's actually there, and you may find yourself artificially imposing a structure on your story that won't do it justice.