Film Kristin Thompson’s
Storytelling in the New Hollywood is the kind of book you wouldn’t ordinarily encounter unless you were studying film either as new craftsman or from an academic perspective. It’s essentially three hundred and nineties pages explaining how film narratives work across a range of genres and types of story, how they keep our interest between the opening and closing credits, how scenes dovetail into one another and why characters interact the way they do. That's where I encountered it and even though I was a relative layman, I came away with a new appreciation of the work that goes into a crafting a film beyond the costumes, sets and special effects. That all of that’s worth naught if the script fundamentally doesn’t work, and I'd suggest that it's probably one of the reasons I graduated.
For decades scriptwriters have been taught that traditionally a film must have three acts. Both experts Syd Field and Robert McKee agree that a film opens with a set up, then a middle portion where most of the action occurs and a wrap up and each section is divided by some kind of transitional moment, most often a plot point. Screenwriters these days generally defer to this three act structure and in the main its agreed that the set-up and climax each use a quarter of the duration and the mid section a half. One obvious example (and the one that Thompson offers) is Speed which literally has three sections: the lift sequence, the bus, the train. Typically, when a film is having problems, one excuse is that the third act isn’t work, a joke made in Altman’s The Player and taken to post-modern extremes in Jonze’s Adaptation in which Charlie Kauffman deliberately seems to sabotage the film by inserting a terrible third act because the fictional version of himself also can’t find a proper ending.
Though Thompson doesn’t disregard this out of hand, she offers a viable, and having reflected on this for a while, watertight alternative. She says that in fact the majority of films have four portions/sections or near equal duration. She says that nearly all of them contain a set-up which introduces the main character(s) and their goal(s), a complicating action where the impediments are enunciated, a development section in which the character(s) come to terms with their lot and a climax in which everything is resolved and goals are reached, followed by an epilogue and that these are separated by turning points that send the story off into a new direction. Time out these turning points and they’re almost equidistant from one another across the film with about a five minute margin of error (Doctor Who fans will already see in this, as I did, why the old four episode story model worked so well -- and how the best stories didn't just have a cliffhanger at the end of episodes one to three, but one which sent the story off in a new direction. The Deadly Assassin -- good. Most eighties stories -- bad).
Effectively, she’s splitting the Field/McKee middle act in two and saying that in a lot of cases a film changes tac at the ‘mid-point’. So in Jaws, the set-up introduces Sheriff Brody and the problem of the shark attacks. The first turning point is the town meeting where Quint offers to kill the shark. The complicating action is the appearance of Hooper and the decision to keep the beaches open whatever and the next turning point is the town agreeing to give Quint the jog. At this mid-point the film changes into a shark hunt, the developing action is the guys at sea and getting to know one another, and the next turning point is them bonding and deciding one a plan of action. The climax is them carrying that out. The film’s about two hours long and each of those turning points happens every half an hour.
She offers a couple of qualifications to take care of shorter or longer films which don’t obviously split into these four sections. Some shorter films retain a three section structure, omitting the complicating portion. In When Harry Met Sally, the set-up is Harry meeting Sally across the years, the turning point is them agreeing to be friends. The development action is their friendship tipping over into something more, the next turning point is them sleeping together, and then the climax is them falling in love. Longer films tend to have five sections, with an extra development section stuffed in somewhere. Her example is Heat – to cut a looong story short – the extra development section is the extended heist; she also notes that most of the turning point action happens to Bobby De Nero’s character – you can usually tell who the ‘main’ character is in a film if all of the turning points happen to them.
Believe me, when I first read the extended version of that I wasn’t able to look at film the same way again. Because, it’s true. With a few more exceptions – mainly were the writer and director are being deliberately obtuse – every film pretty much fits this structure. Grab a calculator. Think of a favourite film, find out the duration, divide it by four, think about when the story moves forward and there you have it. To an extent it’s natural. As Thompson says they have to be written this way in order to keep the audience’s interest and I’d also argue that the reason some so-called art house films can be a trial to watch is because they’re all setup and climax or even setup and complicating action. At the back of the book the writer offers evidence that the reason some films are ‘bad’ is because one of these sections is over sized – an opening or climax is rushed and the middle of the film is too long and it’s just boring.
She applies this model to ten films of increasingly complexity including Back To The Future, Groundhog Day and Hannah and Her Sisters. Each is described in detail pointing out the nuts and bolts of the writing, the structure of the script and most specifically where the turning points are. Under her rules it becomes apparent that Groundhog Day is actually far more conventional that it appears, unusual only in that the antagonist is the situation rather than a specific person. The book was published in 1999 so she missed the head-fuck that was 21 Grams, but I hope she’d come to the same conclusion I did – that there’s a single story thread that runs through the film with Sean Penn as the lead character, with all of the turning points turning up as expected, with flashes back and forth dangling off and Watts and Del Torro as supporting characters.
The discussion areas I found most invaluable at college are about ensemble films, which have multiple protagonists; the rules are relaxed slightly with these though the turning points in each of their stories all happen in roughly the same five minutes and are often unified with a party scene where they all appear or as I noticed in a lot of these things with a montage sequence. And the more characters and stories there are, the longer the film, because they all have to be satisfied and satisfying to watch. There are short cuts that can be taken (if you’ll pardon the expression) but that would lead to a regurgitation of the rant about Love Actually that constituted one third of the final chapter of my dissertation. But it has to be said that it's through this book, my admiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia grew; watch how he deals with all this in the central hour by slowing down the 'temporal duration' or in other words, shows us an hour's worth of story even though just half an hour passes within the world of the film.
The upshot of all this, once you’re aware of it, is that no matter how ghastly a film is, you can at least gain some ‘entertainment’ from trying to work out how these sections time out and what the turning points are and even try and predict what that next turning point is going to be. I was sitting through the horrible remake of The Women this morning, which is the kind of film in which a character only exists to be pregnant so that it can end with a birth and has the audacity to have Candice Bergan who plays Meg Ryan’s mother warning her daughter never to have botox even though Ryan’s face no longer moves naturally. One of the gags is that, like its predecessor there are no men at all in the film, but what that leads to here are scenes which seem to be happening in an alternate reality where the streets of New York are only populated by women. All the indications in the advertising too suggest this is going to be a Steel Magnolia’s style ensemble piece when actually it’s all about Ryan’s character’s marital problems.
The set-up introduces the women, the lifestyle and the turning point is Ryan finding out about her husband’s affair and deciding not to tell him. The complicating action is her meeting the new object of his affections (Eva Mendes who’s the best thing about the film but I probably would say that wouldn't I?). I guessed the next turning point -- her telling her husband that she knows and the potential divorce. The developing action is her rock bottom and losing control. The next turning point is Bette Midler telling her to pull herself together and decide what she really wants and the climax is Ryan opening her fashion house, becoming an independent woman and then deciding to give her husband a second chance now that she’s paradoxically become an independent woman. Annette Benning’s character might have a lot of scenes but she doesn’t really have a story of her own; her job being on the rocks and the betrayal are just so that Ryan’s character lacks a friend to talk to and someone to show that she’s being not a great mother, in other words make her look and feel more rubbish. And sure enough, in a film which is 110 minutes long, a turning point happens every twenty-six minutes with a short epilogue of six minutes that includes the credits.
The fact that I can offer this kind of analysis demonstrates how clearly Thompson puts forward her thesis; though some of the writing could be overtly analytical and usually is in similar books, that isn’t the case here and even I was able to grasp her technique. It’s worth noting too that the opening chapter doesn’t just set up this analyses but all puts it in context by exploding the myth that the seventies brought new storytelling ideas and transplanted a kind of European flavour to Hollywood. That was only reflected in a fraction of the films on release and rarely in the successes. The top grossers, Love Story or The Godfather still relied heavily on this kind of classic storytelling, though she's quick to underscore that fundamentally there isn’t anything wrong with that, since it doesn’t always lead to simplistic mush like The Women but is also the backbone to something as psychologically complex as Silence of the Lambs. In the end, as with all art, it’s not just the technique that counts but how it’s used.
