The ISA Podcast

EXCERPT FROM THE PODCAST:

“...This week, we’re going to be talking about a whole bunch of movies, but they all have one thing in common. They all have more than one main character.

There’s a lot of debate about the question of whether new screenwriters should even attempt to write scripts with multiple main characters. 

There are even some famous gurus who say that “multiplot” structures are just plain bad and that nobody should ever write them.

It’s a good thing nobody ever gave Robert Altman that advice or we would have missed out on a whole chapter of film history! 

We’d also have missed out on a lot of other hugely successful movies, The Squid & The Whale, Little Miss Sunshine, Crash, The Shawshank Redemption, The Usual Suspects, The Godfather, Dead Poets Society, American Beauty, True Detective and the entire library of Quentin Tarantino.

And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we break point-of-view and start telling a story from the point-of-view of multiple main characters..."

The ISA's Max Timm hosts a series of interviews with board members from NYWIFTV, discussing all elements of the entertainment industry from producing to screenwriting, to marketing and content creation for the digital space. The ISA is thankful to New York Women In Film and Television for granting us time with their board members in order to provide insight and education for all creatives within the ISA membership.

We look forward to more collaboration with NYWIFTV in the future, and if you would like to learn more, click the link below:

www.nywiftv.org

Read More About Kathryn O'Kane:

Kathryn O’Kane is a director and producer with over 15 years of diverse experience in television, advertising, and web media. She has produced shows for ABC primetime, Discovery Channel, ESPN, The Sundance Channel, and USA Network and provided content for such distinguished clients as NASA, IBM, Gucci, The Rockwell Group, Ford Motor Company, Nike, Gillette, Budlight, and Grey Goose Vodka.

Kathryn’s strength is telling character-driven stories working with both verité and interview-driven approaches. She has crafted narratives as diverse as “Mission Juno” documenting NASA’s probe to Jupiter, the award-winning “Oprah presents Master Class” the flagship series for OWN, and “Talking Dead” the hit show for AMC. Recent commercial projects include assignments for United Airlines, SAP, and the Carolinas Healthcare System.

Having started her career supporting democratic initiatives in Latin America, Kathryn first learned the power of messaging while organizing election observations in the Dominican Republic with President Jimmy Carter. She now seeks to bridge cultural differences through art and storytelling.

Kathryn is honored to serve on the board of directors of New York Women in Film and Television to support the careers of women in the entertainment industry. Her commercial reel is part of #FreetheBid, which advocates on behalf of women directors for equal opportunities to bid on commercial jobs in the global advertising industry.  She is also a member of the Emmy Television Academy.

“Annabelle: Creation” fails to conjure a great story or enough scares.

Ostensibly the fourth installment in “The Conjuring” horror franchise, “Annabelle: Creation” tells the origins story of the scary doll from ghost hunters Ed & Lorraine Warren’s showroom. This outing has some decent scares, but it doesn’t have a great deal else to recommend it. While the previous three films created strong characters and unsettling dread, this one feels too paint-by-numbers. The characters are underdeveloped, most of the frights are predictable, and the story even loses faith in the demonic Annabelle. When the evil spirit moves on to a crippled girl, a nun, and even a scarecrow, you know this frightener is toying with its premise as well as its audience.

The raucous and raunchy “Girls Trip” shows surprising heart and depth.

R-rated films like “The Hangover” and “Bridesmaids” set the standard for modern comedy raunch, and “Girls Trip” proudly displays its outrageous comic ribaldry. What’s surprising is how much heart this film has as well. The script concerning four college friends reconnecting on a girls’ trip to New Orleans is written by women and it shows. All of the main characters are complex, they’re in their 40’s, and each has a unique arc. And the story doesn’t blanch from confronting issues of infidelity, fertility and faith. It is a surprisingly rich and deep film, especially for one that does such naughty things with a grapefruit and banana.

This week we are going to be looking at Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan.

On top of being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre.

When we think about big budget war movies, we generally think about movies like Saving Private Ryan, movies about great heroism and winning the battle against incredible odds. 

And yet this is a war movie that (for the most part) isn’t about winning but about losing. This is a war movie about a retreat, about a surrender, but also about the kinds of miracles that happen when people care about each other.

This isn’t a typical Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey about one great man, one great woman who saves the world. 

This is a movie about a lot of little individuals.

Some of them are behaving bravely, and some of them are behaving cowardly. Some for their own survival, and some for the survival of others.

Narrative tricks work against the natural drama inherent in “Dunkirk”.

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan wrote wonderful plot twists into his time-bending scripts for “Memento”, “The Prestige”, and “Inception.” But with so much inherent drama in the WWII rescue saga of “Dunkirk”, why did Nolan feel the need to use such tropes in his telling of it? Didn’t he trust the incredible story of how almost 400,000 British and French soldiers were saved from the Dunkirk beaches by civilian boats? And why does he under develop all his characters as well? These issues mar an otherwise taut and superbly realized war film. In doing so, Nolan ended up with a very good film…but it should have been great.

Spider Man Homecoming Part 2 – Creating Unforgettable Characters & The Game of Screenplay Structure

In last week’s podcast we talked about writing a great antagonist by letting go of our need to see them as the bad-guy, who “antagonizes” the main character, and instead stepping into our antagonists as real human beings.

Because every character in your script believes that they are the hero of the story (just like every human being sees themselves as the hero of their story), to write a great character of any kind– a character that actually lives and breathes–we need to see world through their eyes. And this begins by connecting to what our characters want.

And what’s exciting is that when we start to think about our scripts in this way, we not only find unforgettable characters, we also start to organically discover the exact structure we need to tell our stories.

In Spider-Man, Homecoming, what makes the character of the Vulture, Adrian Toomes (played by Michael Keaton) so compelling is that everything he does grows directly out of his simple human desire to provide for his family.

And you can see, if you look at the structure of Spider-Man: Homecoming, that this isn’t just the formula for creating a great bad guy, it is actually a way of creating an entire cast of unforgettable characters, and shaping the journeys they all go on in the script.

Because every single one of these characters is really just a person with a really strong want and a really strong obstacle that forces them to reveal their really strong “how”—the way that they pursue the things that they want differently from everybody else...

In last week’s podcast, we discussed the many differences between playwriting and screenwriting. So this week we’re going to be getting deeper into the craft of screenwriting: what it takes to write a script that succeeds on the page.

As we discussed last week, writing a screenplay often takes more rewriting time than writing a play.

And a big reason is that while most of a play exists in dialogue and develops over rehearsals and workshops, successful screenplays must exist in a far more more finished form on the page.

Technically, so much of rewriting for playwrights takes place during production in the rehearsal process. Whereas most of rewriting a screenplay is going to take place before your movie is even sold or greenlit.

And unlike literary managers at theatres, who are often MFA or PhD graduates with a love of literature, degrees in theatre and a deep understanding of how plays funcion on the page, most screenplays are read by coverage readers, or interns, who not only often have no training at all in how to read a screenplay, but at best are probably skimming your work for $50 bucks a script.

Which means that to succeed as a screenwriter, you must do more than create a blueprint for success. You must in fact create a screenplay that fully demonstrates the experience of your movie for even the least trained reader– that transports them from reading to seeing, and plays effortlessly in the little movie screen in their mind, so that they can see, feel and hear everything, just like if they were watching the film.

So that is just something you need to accept; in order to bring your screenplay to that level you are going to need to do more rewrites.

Hello, I am Jacob Krueger and this is The Write Your Screenplay Podcast. On this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of “two thumbs up, two thumbs down, loved it or hated it,” we look at them in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies and bad movies, movies that we loved and movies that we hated.

This week, we are going to be talking about Spider-Man: Homecoming which is a surprisingly successful film compared to the others in this franchise. And what is nice is that this film doesn’t just succeed based on its fabulous action sequences or the wonderful actors involved in the production. This movie also succeeds because of its script.

So, let’s talk about what makes this script so darn successful. And to do that we have to begin with a discussion about Antagonists.

If you’ve studied screenwriting with me, you know that I don’t actually like the word Antagonist. The reason I don’t like the word Antagonist is because it suggests something that isn’t true in the universe: the idea that there is supposed to be a character in your screenplay that exists only to antagonize the main character.