Scripts are almost completely made up of dialogue - and yet explaining why certain words work well in an actor’s mouth, and why some don’t, is notoriously hard.
It’s often easier to pin down why a line of dialogue doesn’t work. One easy reason is exposition. A trap that new writers, particularly those writing fantasy and sci-fi, can fall into is to have their characters over-explain everything, from their actions, to their motivations, to how their world works and why - even though most people wouldn’t do this in real life. It’s easy to understand why this is a common pitfall; if you’re plunging the viewer into a world where everything is unfamiliar, then it’s hard to bring them along with you if you think they’ll be lost. But dialogue, counterintuitively, is not the best way to bring people along. The best scripts show the characters conveying things by doing, rather than over-explaining. Dialogue really flourishes when it’s written with restraint and used as a tool that underscores the intent behind the characters’ actions - in other words, ‘show, don’t tell.’ One of the best examples is Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal.’ Two of the main characters, Jerry and Emma, open the play by talking about their long-term affair, without talking about it. When we get our first hint of it, the dialogue is laden with repressed emotion. Jerry: Ned’s five, isn’t he? Emma: You remember. Jerry: Well, I would remember that. This could easily have been over-written. See below for how this piece of dialogue could have been rendered by a less-skilled writer. Jerry: Ned’s five, isn’t he? Emma: I’m surprised you remember. He wasn’t exactly planned, and I thought you might have suppressed the shock of thinking for a moment that he might be yours. Jerry: Well, how could I forget? You were having sex with your husband again while I was in America. For half a second, I thought I might be a father again. Compare the two. In the first, the dialogue is so restrained that the weight of past memories almost bursts through the words. Not only do we immediately start to make inferences, piquing our interest in the characters’ lives, but we get the sense of how repressed and uptight they are. They are used to secrecy, which makes their set-up ideal for a play about lies and deception. In the second, we are told so much that we start to get bored. There’s no nuance, and we don’t get to learn much about who the characters are through their speech patterns. In a play like this, less is more. Another example is the recent ITV comedy-drama ‘Maternal,’ which follows the antics of three women in the NHS as they return to work after maternity leave. One of the show’s most powerful and enraging moments is when we see surgeon Catherine applying for a promotion. In a montage sequence that switches back and forth between a golf course and Catherine’s more manic existence, we realise immediately why her male colleague, Jack, will get the promotion. The subtext, not the text, is clear: he has the time to hob-nob with the boss while she has to juggle work and motherhood. There’s no rant about the patriarchy or the glass ceiling from Catherine; there doesn’t need to be. It’s more powerful to let the viewer draw their conclusions when they see the characters live as they probably would in real life. A rant or a speech would feel clunky and over-the-top, making the viewer feel lectured to rather than letting them feel surprise, shock or horror - and thereby stopping them from forging an emotional connection with the characters. If dialogue can’t elicit any emotion other than boredom, then it’s doomed. Another way to make dialogue work might seem basic, but it’s often ignored: grammar. I regularly read scripts that haven’t been fully proof-read or where the dialogue has been carelessly written. For example, using a comma where a full stop should be can make dialogue less fluent and natural, robbing us of a character’s voice and causing us to believe in them less. See below. Jack: Come with me now, it’ll be alright. Compare this to: Jack: Come with me now. It’ll be alright. The second example clearly packs more of a punch. The moral of the story: punctuation matters! This all sounds easier said than done. It’s often hard for writers to tell when their dialogue isn’t working. Many people don’t even know the best way to begin a scene, and to crucially set the tone for their characters’ speech patterns that will give their dialogue fluency and flare. If you’re that person, then a good way in is to take a bit of advice from celebrated ‘West Wing’ writer Aaron Sorkin: imagine that you’re walking in on a conversation. What’s being said? That will tell you, and the viewer, what kind of world you’re in, and how people talk. Here are some examples of first lines that I just came up with. Use this method to try writing your own. ‘I said I would be there.’ ‘Not today. Please, not today.’ ‘You need rules and boundaries. Without that, you have nothing.’ ‘Who are you, and where am I?’ Or, go into a busy place and listen to the people around you. What can you hear? Could that be the first line of your scene - and maybe, our way into your world?
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I often get asked what I do. It’s normal when you work in the arts.
However, for me, the conversation often goes a bit like this – “So, what do you do?” “I work in script development.” “Oh, so what kind of scripts do you write?” “No, I’m not a writer. I don’t write scripts, I develop them.” Blank stare ensues People know what writers do, but not script developers. Most people have no idea who we are or what we do. This is, in a way, understandable. Writers are the creators; the scripts are theirs and they have to put in the effort and creativity. However, although we are not as important as writers, script developers and people in development do play a useful part in the journey of a script, from laptop screen to silver screen. Simply put, development is the area that deals with everything that happens to a script before it is put on a stage or has a camera or microphone pointed at it. We make sure that the script is fit for purpose. Development works with writers to help their ideas grow, to literally help develop them. This can be from the initial stages of an idea or with a later draft of an existing project. For example, I know two writers who found an interesting historical figure from the early 20thCentury. They pitched this person’s life to a production company and they are now writing the first drafts after initial chats with the development team. Drafts will then be sent back to the team, notes will be given, advice taken, rewrites started and then the cycle will start again. With a later draft – we once received draft 10.5 from someone – it is then about asking the writer what they need help with and then looking at the script to provide helpful feedback at that stage of the writing process. It is still about helping grow, helping develop, that script into the best version that the writer can create. We give advice, we encourage, we enable. That is the role of someone in development: helping the story become its best self. The journey continues onto the set or soundstage. Someone from the development team (normally a script editor or a senior member of the development team, sometimes the head of the team) will be on set during a shoot. They will know the script pretty much as well as the writer, as they will have been there for the whole writing process. Their job during production is to act as the script’s guardian through filming and to act as the link between the writer and the production team on re-writes and production decisions. A colleague of mine was working as a script editor on a project which had an emotional break-up scene set on a cliff. In the original scene a storm raged in the background providing a tumultuous natural backdrop to the emotional chaos between the two characters. However, production couldn’t shoot this scene this way - mainly because it was too expensive. They approached the script editor and asked if they could set the scene in a kitchen instead. They already had the set for the kitchen. It would be better if the scene could be set in the kitchen. So, the scene had to be moved to the kitchen. The script editor had to confirm that that would be ok and then work with the re-writes to make it the best version of that scene, but now set around a kitchen island, not on the cliffs of Cornwall. Myth-busting Alongside not knowing about how development teams aid writers in their writing process, there are a lot of myths that exist around the script-writing process itself. I’d like to look at a few of them to help clarify a few things. People think that scripts just happen – they don’t. It is a common phenomenon, as a creative person, to look at an excellent piece of art, a performance, a piece of writing and think that the artist has had no help; that their work has emerged fully formed and perfect into the world. This is not true. The only person I know of who created work perfectly in one go is Mozart. Everyone else has painted a terrible painting, put on a terrible performance, written a terrible script. All artists do these things, keep doing them and get better as they do so. And they will have had advice and help on how to get better. We have this romantic view of a writer being a solitary genius in a garret room or at a table in a downtown coffee shop valiantly striving by themselves. This is does not have to be the case. Often it is not the case. You don’t have to do it by yourself. You can’t. You will need help from others. Everyone from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Quentin Tarantino will have had help and advice on how to make their work better. And they’re really good. But they still they didn’t do it alone. And neither do you. Don’t feel bad getting advice from outside. Another common phenomenon is that we encounter people who say that their script is not ready to be seen or who are nervous about people reading it. This is understandable. It has just been you and your script for a long time, it is the physical manifestation of your imagination and several hours/days/months of work. However, it will need to be seen by someone at some point. There will also never be a point where you are completely satisfied with your writing. You will never feel like it's at a perfect stage to show everyone. So don’t worry about someone else having a look at it. You will at some point have to let it go. The point of development is also to help grow a project. We have seen writing from all stages. Script development is there to help you on your journey. Now, some people will take that advice, run with it, and show their script to anyone and everyone, which is also not always helpful. Showing your work to family members or friends who don’t work in the scripted side of the industry can be just as unhelpful as keeping your script to yourself. Someone who is close to you may not be the best person to give you feedback on your work. They will get all your jokes, all your references, that others who don’t know you may not, and they won’t want to give you any real feedback for fear of hurting your feelings. They will just say that it’s great. Or, conversely, if they do spot things that may need tweaking, they will just point out things that they don’t like but not give you any way of re-directing or altering those things. Neither of these is very helpful. It is always good to give your script to someone who is dispassionate about it. Not that people in development don’t care – we do – it’s just that we can see the whole woodland rather than just the individual trees, as we’re not caught up in the dense undergrowth of all the story-growing. We can stand outside the whole thing and judge it as a whole. Script-writing doesn’t have to be a lonely process; people are there to offer advice. However, don’t seek advice or feedback from just anyone, as what you get back will probably not be the most useful. Script developers are there to be the middle ground – people who are there to help but won’t start trampling all over your creativity. The point of development is to hold the writer’s hand and say this is alright, it will work. We all love stories, and we want to make the best ones possible. So, what do I do? I help build stories. It’s often taken for granted that older men will have relationships with much younger women - in TV and film as well as in life, so much so that it’s barely questioned. From Casablanca, to Mississippi Burning, to Lost in Translation, we’re led to believe that this is the natural way of things; the implication is clearly that men have lothario instincts that they cannot control and older women are not desirable. Yet it was refreshing to see this trend reversed in the excellent Now TV drama ‘Mare of Easttown,’ where Kate Winslet plays grizzled, disillusioned police officer Mare Sheehan, a woman whose joys are few and misfortunes many.
There’s no shortage of other cliches; it is, after all, a crime drama. Easttown is a Pennsylvania backwater largely populated by second and third-generation Irish-Americans for whom the American Dream was never a reality. No-one seems able to leave, despite how often the town snuffs out their dreams, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Mare has to live constantly with the memory of her drug-addicted son who killed himself, her estranged husband who lives in a house that backs onto her garden, and the disapproval and anger of town residents railing against a police force who keep failing to solve the disappearance and murder of a number of young girls. A frustrated Mare ultimately decides to take things into her own hands - with mixed consequences. It could perhaps only feel less hackneyed if it was a plot to Charlie Brooker’s satirical police show ‘A Touch of Cloth.’ Yet what makes ‘Mare of Easttown’ feel original is what goes unremarked in the script. Mare is cantankerous, surly, and stubbornly uninterested in appeasing the expectations of others. On one or two occasions we see her take notice of her physical appearance, but this goes uncommented on by the other characters - except maybe her caustic mother Helen, whose barbed exchanges with Mare make up some of the more hilarious moments in the dialogue. What’s more, despite Mare’s refusal to be compliant and coquettish, she regularly attracts the attention of the men around her - including the measured and thoughtful (and sultry) creative writing professor Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), who is new to the town, and a far younger member of her police team, handsome detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters). Colin and Mare get as far as going on a date, and despite the age gap (she is likely old enough to be his mother), no-one comments on it. In a previous decade her dalliance with Richard might have led to a revelation that he was the murderer (he isn’t), feeding the malicious idea that women who dare to seek love and sexual gratification must be punished. Instead, their romance pauses for more believable and mundane reasons - he ends up moving away for work, just as Mare is starting to get her own demons under control. Despite the relationship not working out (at least, for now), instead of regret Mare is seen to have been changed by the kindness and attention of another human being, and by having her own needs valued for once. Another small but important detail is that Mare’s ex-husband does not abandon her for a much younger woman - his wife-to-be is the same generation and had children at a similar age. The only other story I’ve seen recently that dares to have older women form liaisons with men their own age or younger is last year’s musical comedy The Prom, where Meryl Streep and Keegan-Michael Peele have wonderful chemistry as the small-town Indiana high school principal who tries to coax a floundering Broadway star into becoming more selfless. Easttown might be a backwards place in many ways, yet this means characters who dare to be themselves shine more brightly and more believably. Women like Mare are desirable for their frankness and dedication to duty in a place where everyone nurses compromised loyalties, dark secrets and repressed fears. Kate Winslet is still remembered by most millennials as Rose, the straight-jacketed heroine from Titanic. Yet finally, in middle age, in this most restrictive of genres, it seems her straitjacket is off. *** Spoiler Warning - Contains details for Season 4 of Rick and Morty and WandaVision ***
I’ve been annoyed by the smugness and B-Movie gore of ‘Rick and Morty’ every time I’ve tried to watch it, even though I can see why many people enjoy its anarchic charms. That said, one of the few episodes that clicked with me was ‘Never Ricking Morty’ in Season 4, where jaded scientific genius Rick and his grandson Morty end up trapped on a train that embodies the literal and figurative story arc of the episode. To make the story progress, the duo leave the train at various intervals and loudly and deliberately announce the plot points to evade the tyrannical grip of Story Lord, a villain who wants the characters to behave in ways consistent with their development in the series so far. Rick gleefully gives a middle finger to this by defying almost every expectation anyone, including the viewer, might have. Ironically, by doing so he adheres strictly what we’ve come to expect - that he is unpredictable and nihilistic, and Morty is timid and spineless. Although it still feels supercilious, there are some enjoyable jokes about the crass methods writers employ when trying to make sure they adhere to the Bechdel Test, where to pass, two named female characters need to have a conversation that’s not about men - considered the minimum standard for how to write credibly about women. The moment where Rick falls to his knees and seemingly finds God is hilarious (not least for briefly introducing Biblesaurus and Mr Celery to cheer him along) and makes fun of how often writers cynically use religion to make cheap points. Yet going ‘meta’ like this is a risky strategy. The subtext (or lack of it) in ‘Never Ricking Morty’ is obvious: writing is a nonsensical and cliched process, people are stupid for being so invested in an imaginary world, and writers are boring and self-absorbed for either making their characters conform to their own egotistical wishes, or on the flip side, to self-indulgently try to be experimental, as with this episode. The writers seem to be trying to comment on the sheer absurdity of the world they inhabit by poking fun at their own attempts to undermine it - which somehow rings hollow given that the writers of ‘Rick and Morty’ almost certainly take their craft extremely seriously. It’s also not unreasonable for audiences to want coherence and structure in their stories, even if at their worst, those conventions can descend into cliches and tropes. It can feel alienating, and does the very thing I’ve often found tedious about ‘Rick and ‘Morty,’ that it sneers at the audience. Although it’s important that writers break free of such restrictions when it serves the story (and those restrictions can include the demands of their fans), it’s disingenuous to pretend that any kind of creative writing doesn’t flourish from reaching a wider audience. In short, telling people that they’re idiots is not likely to win you more fans (admittedly, not something the creators of ‘Rick and Morty’ have to worry about much, given how immense and devoted their audience is). The Marvel series ‘Wandavision’ does something similar, in a less pugnacious way. As a way of coping with the trauma of losing her lover, Vision, during the antics of ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ Wanda (otherwise known in the Marvel Universe as Scarlet Witch) forces people around her to act in parodies of the TV shows from her childhood that her father would smuggle from America through the Iron Curtain - to the point where she effectively brings Vision back from the dead and imagines an alternate life where they live happily with their two young sons. As well as highlighting the coping mechanisms people use to endure grief, the series reminds us of what the act of watching people on screen amounts to - forcing people into roles that control and limit them for our own gratification. One of the stumbling blocks with this approach is that firstly, the American TV shows ‘Wandavision’ imitated were often lost on non-American viewers. Although I could spot the ‘Modern Family’ parody in the later episodes, I had never seen ‘The Dick van Dyke Show’ or ‘Full House.’ Much of the early episodes of ‘Wandavision’ left those outside the USA scratching their heads - which is a bit of an oversight given how huge and global Marvel’s audience is. This only served to undermine the show-within-a-show trope that was a central plank of the series. With these ‘meta’ elements, there’s also a slight degree of ‘so what?’ After all, if the show is supposed to be making some wider point about how we all manipulate and control those around us, then the scenario is too fantastical to make that point convincingly. It’s perhaps rather telling that the recent ‘Loki’ series has had the highest viewing figures of all the Marvel TV series so far, including ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,’ despite the God of Mischief being lumbered with a mid-week slot rather than a coveted Friday one. If you go ‘meta,’ do it with care, or else steer clear. Jesus Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey, I think one can say that the ending of Line of Duty was controversial. Years of tension, deaths, twists, lost hands, lost lovers all culminating in, wait for it: Ian Buckells, that rather dull bloke with curly hair.
One can’t really throw too much shade at Jed Mercurio. He has successfully kept the nation entertained for nearly ten years. Dropping the baton at the end isn’t great but to get so far still holding it, and wielding it so well, is amazing. That doesn’t mean the clang as it hit the ground can be ignored, though. He still dropped it. A reason that things slipped from Jed’s grasp was that he didn’t realise that the show he was finishing was no longer the same show as the one he had started with. Series one of Line of Duty is a thriller. It’s about tension and suspense, the fear of being found out. The stakes are high, but they’re driven by real, human mistakes. Tony Gates is a good cop. He does his job, he gets promoted. He’s a bit proud but seems to be a fairly decent guy; people like him. However, he has a flaw. Like so many middle-aged men he’s having an affair. The man still loves his kids though so can’t break his family apart by revealing it. Here we have a level of struggle that people can identify with. It’s a real-life-sized struggle and drives him into misstep after misstep trying to cover it up. He’s not bent but his fight to cover up his mistakes makes him seem so. He is brought down by his guilt and the messiness of human life clashing with the cold hard rules of AC-12. It is the cruel banality of life not being fair. Jump to series six. We have car chases and gun fights and standoffs in carparks. We do still have human struggles and fear of being found out – Steve’s back, Hasting’s guilt over Corbett – but these don’t drive the plot. Steve’s impending interview about his back just provides rather annoying emails that he ignores, and Hastings’ ‘secret’ provides only minor level tension at best. What drives the plot, what increases the tension, is a series of dramatic set pieces – the gunfight over the Lakewell convoy, the stand-off at gunpoint between Kate and Pilkington. This is not every day human level drama. These are straight out of an action movie. Line of Duty is no longer bobbies on the beat, it’s Bond. It’s understandable how we got here. Every successive season the stakes had to rise to keep the audience interested. Also, as the show becomes more successful, there’s more money pumped in so there’s more opportunity to do stuff. So, first season we have fingers being chopped off; final season we have Steve lying by a crashed van after a lengthy shoot out having assassinated a sniper. Where this switch from thriller to action can be traced to is the escape of Dot ‘The Caddy’ Cottan at the end of season three. This starts with the standard, tense, thriller-esque interview in the glass box. It’s psychological. It’s character-led tension. It’s the great stuff we’ve had so far. We then have an “Urgent Exit” requested and it snaps into an over-the-top action movie. A policeman with a machine gun suddenly unloads on a colleague, then on a glass window, shattering it. Kate turns into Sarah Connor, tooling up with flak jacket and machine gun, riding on a massive truck as if this is what she does every day. She even shoots a henchman and doesn’t blink. From then on, we have action movie blood injected into the veins of our thriller. Now, the rules of action movies are different. They demand bigger things, bigger bangs, cool guys walking away from explosions. They’re more ridiculous. Bond is fun because it’s not real. Even when they tried to make it ‘real’ with Daniel Craig, we knew it’s still not really ‘real’ as most of us don’t go to fancy casinos or drive fast cars or try and rescue our drowning treacherous girlfriends from collapsing Venetian houses. After season three, Line of Duty becomes more and more ridiculous. Roz Huntley has a rotting arm which gets amputated, poor Joanne Davidson has the twisted family history of a penny dreadful. These are huge, dramatic, and awful things but they’re not the banal cruelty of normal life that destroys most people. They’re cartoon level horrors that plague movie-level plots. They’re not real. This doesn’t mean that it’s ‘bad’. The escape of Dot is a fantastic piece of television. Kate Fleming is the action heroine this nation needs. Bond movies are fun, but they’re not the television that Mercurio started writing. This is the problem with the end of season six. If you give your audience a Bond movie, they’re going to want Blofeld to turn up. We want that swivel chair, the fluffy cat, the “Ah, Superintendent Hastings, I was expecting you”. We didn’t get that. We got Ian Buckells. What Mercurio did with Buckells as the ‘big bad’ was to try and return to the first season, to where he began, where the world is ordinary and boring and real. There is no mastermind, there’s a just a little bloke who’s greedy and has low morals. Now, imagine if Bond blasted his way through the tropical island base, fought off the henchman with the idiosyncratic disfigurement, crawled into the centre of the villain’s lair only to find the head office being run by a clerk who administers the paperwork for the shell company set up to contain the holdings of another shell company that comes from several illicit hedge funds. Even if someone tried to explain that that is actually how crime works, how actual shadowy figures run the world, you’d still want your money back. I suppose the moral of this story is remember where you started. Remember what your piece of writing is about. By that I don’t just mean ‘it’s about a bunch of policemen in AC-12’ but what themes you are looking at, what genre you’re writing in, and try and keep to that through line. However, if you do end up changing things, make sure that you make everything match that shift. Mercurio started with a thriller on how our own humanity can bring us down; how evil is banal, and cruel in its banality; that life is unfair and that it rumbles on without us. He tried to end it that way. However, on the way, he got lost in Cottan’s big budget escape, fights with surgical saws, and gun fights. And because of that his ending fell flat. He started with The Wire and ended with Bond. And once you go Bond you have to give us a Blofeld. Buckells just won’t do. One of my favourite ways to de-stress during the various lockdowns has been to sort and re-sort my bookshelf. I suspect I’m not the only one who has found this therapeutic, not least because an upside is that it diverts my attention towards any forgotten or neglected gems.
Two books I recently went back to are my copies of the script for Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ and the combined scripts for the TV series ‘Fleabag.’ As with most of the books on my shelf, they rub shoulders mostly because they were gifts at one point; yet after a re-read, I started musing on a bigger connection between the two - silence. I’ll confess that I saw ‘Betrayal,’ a play about the agonising love triangle between a husband, Robert, his wife, Emma, and Robert’s best friend Jerry, eight times on stage during its 2019 run - seven times in London and once in New York - so it’s one of the scripts I know the most intimately. This wasn’t just out of a passion for Pinter. Anyone who has glanced at my Twitter feed will know my love for Tom Hiddleston (who plays Robert) runs deep. My affection for Charlie Cox (who plays Jerry) runs almost as deep, especially as finding out that Cox was due to tread the boards in ‘Betrayal’ was some kind of compensation after the cancellation of ‘Daredevil.’ I wasn’t as familiar with the back catalogue of Zawe Ashton, the actor who played Emma, but I found her restrained, simmering performance throughout the run to be masterful - at times aloof, at other times incredibly tender, essential qualities in a play about extra-marital affairs and ruined relationships, where a lot is implied, but little is overtly said. The restraint in Pinter’s writing is what makes ‘Betrayal’ so compelling. Just as with works by George Orwell or Graham Greene, Pinter makes economy of dialogue seem effortless, even when we know deep down that it’s the product of immense skill, honed over a long time. Pinter’s pauses and silences are also deliberate, and loud. A good example is in the opening scene, when Jerry and Emma are looking back on their now-defunct affair, which unspools in reverse throughout the rest of the play. Mostly they make small talk, but in a rare moment of exposed vulnerability, Jerry and Emma look at each other for a long time in silence, before Jerry calls Emma, with longing, “Darling.” To the audience the silence is drawn out like a blade, making Jerry’s woeful utterance of that one word tell us all we need to know about how he views the past, as well as his current emotional state. As Cox put it in a full-cast interview with Radio 4 in 2019, “with a pause, it’s either because you were going to say something and decide not to, or you thought the other person was going to say something and they didn’t - the idea being that you take a break in the continued through-line of that moment, so you pause. With a silence, during or after a silence one or both of the characters are changed, and then you have to pick up a new moment at the end of it. There’s something very dead and alive to a silence that a pause doesn’t quite have.” As Hiddleston put it, “the silences allow the subtext to live.....your mind re-writes history with that new piece of information that you have, and you realise you’re a fool.” We learn something in the silences. They’re not coincidental - they’re an essential part of the script. ‘Fleabag,’ a dark comedy about the tortured antics of a woman in her thirties, does something very similar, in that more about the characters is given away in the spaces between words, rather than the words themselves. The character of Fleabag herself, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, even highlights this by how often she states that traumatic incidents in her family are dealt with by her kith and kin in a specific way - “we don’t talk about it.” There’s even an entire episode towards the end of the first season where Fleabag and her sister Claire spend time in a silent retreat house, a trip that initially prompts scepticism in both of them, but eventually lets them both learn by listening and watching rather than talking. Fleabag even manages to reconcile with the man who rejected her application for a business loan (Hugh Dennis) when she watches him take part in a course designed to help him overcome his warped view of women in the wake of a sexual harassment complaint. Her silence means he can open up, and she can see that his behaviour during their initial encounter - he asks her to leave his office after she accidentally exposes herself - has a root to it. She can see that he has as many insecurities and regrets as her. As he puts it, “I’m just a very....disappointing man.” Their rapport vastly improves after this encounter. In the show’s second season, the infamous ‘hot priest’ (Andrew Scott) is one of the few people who notices how much Fleabag hates answering questions, as well as how often she speaks to the camera - a camera that we know is there, but the other characters don’t. The presence of the audience is implied through her quiet nods to the camera, and we, as viewers, are invited to lean into the silences in a way that makes those around her feel excluded. We immediately feel an intimacy with her that makes us more invested in her world, sometimes without even realising it. That’s not to suggest that silence isn’t a risky tactic in a script. Many writers fall into the trap of relying too much on actions to fill in the gaps between characters’ conversations, even though it’s a danger to make actions too flowery or descriptive, or leading - after all, theatres have a limited amount of money to spend on sets, especially after the pandemic. The dialogue has to do the heavy-lifting, so silence has to be used within the characters’ interactions, not outside of them. The 2019 version of ‘Betrayal,’ which was directed by Jamie Lloyd, was a great case-study in what you can achieve with a stripped-back set, containing only a few chairs, a table and three actors. Phoebe Waller-Bridge achieved something similar with the stage version of ‘Fleabag,’ which spawned the TV series. It was one woman on a chair, interacting with the audience. The message I took home from going back over both sets of scripts, and remembering the productions they spawned, was clear - less is more, and silence can be golden, but it’s still important to let the dialogue do the work. Therefore let your silences speak. It may sound a stupid thing to say – cinema and television are visual mediums. They have viewers, spectators, watchers. Theatre is a listening medium. It has an audience and auditoriums - places for hearing. Simply put - show us things on screens and tell us stuff in the theatre.
This is, of course, a massive simplification. Some of the best bits in screen history are spoken – few people remember the car that Brando sits in when he says he could have been a contender, but we remember him saying it – and some of the great moments in the theatre are purely visual – anyone who saw the stairs scene in One Man Two Guvnors I’m sure would agree. However, it is worth bearing in mind that on the screen we can say less than we need to on stage, and some of the best moments can be done with no words at all or at least very few of them. Two examples of this can be found in dramas of the last year – The Salisbury Poisonings and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The Salisbury Poisonings is a great piece of television to watch for any writer wanting to create sensitive, historical based fiction or even just well written drama. All moments are simply drawn and sensitively handled. The scene that I want to look at is from episode three when Claire Sturgess is sitting beside her sister Dawn Sturgess, who is lying in a hospital bed. Claire clasps her hand and says: “Dawnie? Dawnie? You are a good person. You are a good person. You always were.” She strokes her hair and breaks down. That is the whole scene. In its entirety it takes a minute. What makes this scene good, besides the excellent performance from Melanie Gutteridge, is its simplicity. Up to this point we have seen that Dawn has not been the best of daughters or mothers, struggling to reclaim her life and a position of responsibility for it. The relationship with her family is a complex one. We could easily have had a very moving, but very long, bedside speech from her sister on that relationship, the ups and downs, the emotional depths. But we don’t need it. All we need is a woman’s kind words to her dying sister. It is all in those fifteen words. The history, the pain, the struggle of Dawn to be good amongst all her difficulties, the love her sister has for her. And it is the simplicity of what is spoken that makes it moving. There is no flowery language, which can get in the way on screen, just a simple statement repeated. You don’t need to give your character that massive monologue. You can just give her a few words. They can be all you need. Sometimes, you don’t even need words. The opening minute of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom has no speech at all. It begins with the quiet woods of southern America at night, then two black men in old fashioned clothes are running, hard. Suddenly, the sounds of dogs barking come over the panting breath of the running men. We’re about 40-50 seconds in and we think we know where we are – two slaves are escaping and the slavers are after them with the plantation dogs. Suddenly, the sound of music kicks in as the two men approach some torches. One turns to smile at the other as they reach a queue of people waiting to enter a tent. They weren’t running away but rather towards a blues performance. In this one moment we have some of the major ideas of the film given to us – the history of black suffering in America and the escape from it that the blues provides. But we are also shown that the blues and the suffering are intertwined; the idea of both – the fleeing and the need to get to the concert – are present in the same moment. Nothing is said but through what we are shown we are given a sudden and clear illustration of the ideas of the film. Every event after this scene is affected by the audience’s having seeing two ‘slaves’ running for their lives. Every event for the characters is, of course, affected by that history too. Every struggle, every confrontation in the film has the history and mistreatment of black people in America hanging over it and we have it captured in the opening gesture of the film. Again, this is a scene about a minute long. If we contrast this with some of the speeches later in the film. These are fantastically delivered by Chadwick Boseman as Levee but they are clearly from a play (Ma Rainey being and adaptation of August Wilson’s play). No one talks that much in film. It is hard to make things visually interesting when one person is talking, no matter how good the performance is, and speeches can often hold up the action. In the theatre they generally are the action, as we can only ‘see’ what the characters tell us. In film we can see anything. In the cinema we are there to be spectators not an audience; we are there primarily to watch, not to listen. Moments of great emotion are conveyed in the theatre through an outpouring of words. Often on film they are conveyed through a few or even none. Sometimes you can say it best when you say nothing at all. The premise of 'Santa Clarita Diet' begs some questions. Why do we need another show about a middle class family in California living in a huge house? Indeed, why do we need another TV show or film about zombies?
The series ended two years ago after being adopted (and then brutally orphaned) by Netflix, but I only came across it this past Christmas while on a Timothy Olyphant binge. The description certainly raised eyebrows: the couple at the centre, real estate agents Joel and Sheila Hammond, see their humdrum existence thrown off-balance when Sheila (Drew Barrymore) becomes one of the undead and has to eat human flesh to survive. There are many ways this could have gone wrong. Yet somehow, this series beats the odds and is hilariously original without reinventing the wheel, demonstrating how much you can achieve by re-configuring worn-out tropes. In particular, the script is a great example of how to have a screwball comedy without needing to dumb things down. The writing is sharp and often very droll: references to rotting Nazi meat and the logistics of keeping a mutant zombie organ as a pet coincide with whether or not bird feeders are a good barometer of someone’s character and how to retract a bad restaurant review on Yelp. Although there is still the occasional gross-out moment (flatulent corpses anyone?), it has far more in common with 'Arrested Development' than with 'The Big Bang Theory.' What also sets it apart is that unlike other shows that make fun of suburban America, such as 'Modern Family,' 'Santa Clarita Diet' has positive messages at its core without being mawkish. The big heart never quite undercuts the gore-spattered irreverence. On example is that instead of using marital discord as a cheap plot device, Joel (played by Olyphant) and Sheila are shown to adore and respect each other. They are equals in every sense and in many ways, the challenges they face from Sheila’s new condition make their relationship flourish. Despite having been a jock for most of his life, what Joel loves about Sheila isn’t threatened when she radically changes from someone uptight and reserved to one who is outgoing and impulsive. He loves her for who she is, allowing her to change and develop rather than clinging to his own limited, unchanging vision of her rooted in their time in high school. The show also gleefully undermines our expectations of the other characters. At various points we are introduced to a gangster who is fussy about his couch and owns a rescue snake (christened 'Baby'), a middle-aged mother who oozes self-confidence and has a rampant libido, a devout Christian police officer whose lesbianism never clashes with her evangelical fervour, and a tattooed motorcycle mechanic who likes listening to schmaltzy children’s songs. In fact, the zombie virus helps most of the characters affected by it move closer to their true selves, or the version of themselves they always wanted to be, unburdened by other people’s expectations. This is summed up in one of the show’s recurring catchphrases - “people can be more than one thing.” The suggestion is that turning into a zombie can make you a better person - or if not, turn you into someone more interesting. After all, as Joel regularly points out, “we kill people.” Another crucial factor is that the feminism on display is coy, played in a way that rarely gets didactic or makes the audience feels lectured to. Eric, the boy next door who tries to help the family find a cure for the zombie virus, is a nerd who is shy and self-effacing with women without being a bitter misogynist. His mother Lisa juggles her work as a pharmaceutical rep with being a borderline nymphomaniac, all while raising a son whom she teaches to have healthy and respectful sexual relations with women. Importantly, Lisa’s sexual confidence comes from herself rather than from others - she regularly comments on how attractive she is, rather than absorbing those comments from anyone else. Furthermore, Joel and Sheila’s daughter Abby is independent and sassy without playing up to the vapid ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope, and is never portrayed as manipulative. Although Eric assists the Hammonds whenever he can, Abby endlessly wrangles over how she should manage her friendship with him, keen not to lead him on and to protect him from the excesses of her new zombie-afflicted life while greatly valuing his friendship and support. She even says to Eric, who becomes her ever-loyal sidekick, that his job is not to keep her happy - his (mostly doomed) romantic interest in her is not something she has any interest in exploiting. It shouldn’t be surprising that 'Santa Clarita Diet' was written by a man - yet I still often read scripts where the much-maligned ‘male gaze’ is active. Hackneyed tropes when it comes to writing women still creep into the work of a lot of aspiring screenwriters. 'Santa Clarita Diet' shows how high the bar has become, which makes it all the more tragic that it was cancelled after its third season, for a murky and (as ever) unexplained reason by Netflix. Until another company picks up season 4, use your lockdown time wisely. Enjoy this masterclass in thoughtful and life-affirming comedy writing There’s been a quiet but welcome trend in television in recent years, which is that the bar has got higher for writing about religion. I feel like I’m seeing fewer and fewer religious individuals or institutions being depicted as little more than evil or sanctimonious caricatures, with even the Catholic Church, which it would be safe to say has undergone some high-profile PR disasters in the last few decades, getting more well-rounded treatment.
Some great examples include Season 2 of ‘Fleabag’ (think Andrew Scott’s ‘hot priest’) and 2017’s excellent mini-series ‘Broken,’ which stars Sean Bean as a troubled but honourable cleric in a deprived parish in the north of England. Then there’s ‘Daredevil,’ which boldly made Catholicism a major theme throughout the whole show, in a way that somehow managed not to put off non-believing members of its sizeable fan base. Yet despite Marvel having waded into the river Jordan, religion in the Star Wars universe has received less attention - possibly because in the original trilogy, the spirituality in the films adhered to something like a nebulous eastern mysticism, the origins of which are hard to pin down. If there are any real-world comparisons, then Jedi Knights seem a cross between Buddhist monks and the Samurai, while the Force could be anything from chakras, to the i-ching, to the Dao. The religious and spiritual themes conveyed in the Disney Plus series ‘The Mandalorian’ are easier to discern than in the films, but still subtle, which is a large part of why they work. Remember that the first-among-equals rule in any kind of creative writing is ‘show, don’t tell.’ On the surface, ‘The Mandalorian’ is a space western, thoroughly rooted in the Star Wars universe in the years after the events of Return of the Jedi, but having more in common with shows like Joss Whedon’s cult early 2000s series ‘Firefly.’ The titular Mandalorian, real name Din Djarin, is a bounty hunter with a badge, a mercenary who is a member of a fanatical warrior caste originating from the planet Mandalore. The Mandalorians are a creed rather than a race, exiled from their home, and, in some cases, are literally wondering the desert. The Old Testament allusions are obvious. More overt, however, are New Testament themes of rebirth, redemption and personal sacrifice, although they are still done with a light touch. Mando’s discovery of the Child in the first episode (whom we later discover to be called Grogu) causes him to literally and emotionally reach out, his silhouette a clear echo of Michelangelo’s iconic depictions of God and Adam touching fingers on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This is a key moment on multiple levels. After rescuing the Child from the yet-to-be-specified evils that the Empire has planned for him, Mando changes. His life becomes one defined by fatherhood and self-surrender, with his every action led by the needs of the Child, rather than by pure economic gain. In turn, the Child inspires religious levels of devotion in almost everyone he encounters, both on and off screen (try typing ‘Baby Yoda’ into Twitter and seeing what happens. The fact that Yoda is long dead by this point continues to be stubbornly ignored by the show’s fans). Even a vicious droid who is initially loathed by Mando for trying to kill the Child is re-wired into becoming Grogu’s nurse rather than his assassin, eventually walking through lava at the end of Season 1 to bring his precious cargo to safety. It demonstrates one of the most uplifting messages in the series - that any of us can change for the best if we prioritise the needs of others. Yet Season 2 shows us the darker side of creeds, castes and cults, although again, the writers don’t over-do it. In an intriguing twist, it turns out that the Mandalorian’s rigid adherence to never uncovering his face, a much-debated tenet of parts of Islam, does not mean he will be shunned by all other Mandalorians, as is implied in Season 1. Instead, we are shown that he lives by an especially austere brand of the creed, one which, in a clever reversal of real-world events, the female members he encounters do not follow. He is engaged with by his peers but branded a zealot, which forces the audience to question why the desire to keep his face covered is so dear to him - and how he would adapt if he no longer could. His new-found identity as an adoptive father to the Child therefore becomes an even more crucial aspect of his character arc. The final episode of Season 2 is traumatic for a number of reasons, not least because the Child is finally taken away for Jedi training by Luke Skywalker (courtesy of a digitally re-generated, Return of the Jedi-era Mark Hamill), in a manner so clinical and detached it makes you re-think your childhood longing to wield a lightsaber. The fact that Skywalker manages to keep a dry eye when everyone in his universe, and beyond, is bawling their eyes out over the Child and the Mandalorian being wrenched apart perhaps attests to how the monastic sense of distance from all worldly attachments is an essential, and for must of us, unobtainable, part of being a Jedi. Indeed, it seems a requirement for any kind of life devoted to other-worldly transcendence, whether through reaching Nirvana or mastering the Force. It makes for a moving contrast that Mando finally chooses of his own volition to remove his mask as he says farewell to the Child - a sign, in a small way, that love has triumphed over lore. For the first time since the age of ten, I was glad that no-one had taken me away to the Jedi temple before I reached my teenage years. Ultimately, much like the hit Netflix series ‘The Good Place,’ the writers of ‘The Mandalorian’ perhaps succeed in this area because instead of anchoring the story in a specific tradition (such as the clear allegories in the worlds of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien), they focus on themes that all religions and philosophical traditions seem to wrestle with - the implications of edicts, traditions and schisms on the one hand, and the importance of courage, the meaning of family, and adherence to a higher purpose on the other. Watch, and learn. Hi all! For those who enjoyed Owen's fascinating take of Enola Holmes, here's a very interesting counter-argument from the London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n20/michael-wood/at-the-movies
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