QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.Check it out here. And for more on dramatic scene writing, this is good, too.SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.
IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.
THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Damn Good Advice
Via 2am Theatre, here is David Mamet's 2005 memo to the writers of his struggling and now canceled TV show, The Unit. It is pretty much as advertised: a master class on dramatic writing in about 30 paragraphs (and most of those are pretty short). I have my issues with Mamet, but this is good stuff. In its original, "shouty" ALL CAPS:
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5 comments:
Of course, with such good advice, one wonders why the show was cancelled.
A more than fair cop. Though, from the sound of it, they seemed to be having trouble from the execs wanting more of the dreaded exposition. I wonder if the show had been on cable or a network not so wedded to an older demographic if it wouldn't have succeeded more.
Though I'm a fan of a lot of his work (and I do love "Glengarry" and "Buffalo" more than is healthy for me), I would hate to have Mamet as any kind of a teacher/director/spirit guide. He seems to be the kind of guy who always must be seen as having it all figured out. Pithy, glib platitudes are his stock in trade. This is this, and that is that. Period.
Reading his guide for actors, "True and False," is a hoot, mainly for his utterly emascualting and reductive assessment of the actor's task: Say the lines as written, with no inflection whatsoever, as if you were reading the phone book. On what planet does this approach lead to an interesting performance?
Like I said, when he's at the top of his game, he's extraordinary. But I do think poor Dave has sampled his own Kool Aid.
It's a gnarly show, and if it were solely about its men it would have lasted. But, with the women characters (I know!), there were two problems:
A) They were backstabbing, duplicitious, adulterous, child-neglectful, complicated people;
B) Who *weren't* soldiers. They had no excuse for their duplicity save that of what Carmella Soprano had, but with far less nuance.
The series' power couple wasn't Jonas and his Lady Macbeth chocolate honeydip; it was Tiffy and her knife-edge man Mack, who went through separations (oooh, she's sleeping with his CO? And no one dies? Oh, look, he took it out on that squad of Arab terrorists....), reconciliations, damaging their teen daughter in the process (who was so angry a teacher in their new town almost busted the entire family's covert operation to catch the assassins of the Vice President (you heard me), because said teacher thought the kid would get a trenchcoat and start shootin'), went through all that emotional wildness, with no consequences.
The natural state of a tv drama is to mold its cast as a family; the natural tendency of a soap opera is to blast its couples apart, and reconfigure them in interesting ways. The Unit made that larger family sociopathic and lethal, but since Mamet and Ryan gladly used the post-9/11 jingoism to stress the virtue of strong military families, no matter what they do, no one divorced, no one wife-swapped, and the one single guy got killed, but then, who ever remembered his name? He had no wife, therefore no private life.
The women made me want to hurl a brick into the TV set, because they became worse people the more they were loyal to the military. Their decisions and autonomy went away once the writers decided to involve them in the last season's covert op. It was one thing to lie to friends outside the base about what their husbands did, and put up with the surveillance and probes the Army dished out when something went wrong, but once they started actively working for the state, it was like watching East German snitches do the dishes.
With all the rhetoric of liberty and freedom these deployed families supposedly backed, they willful submitted to our permanent security state -- and no one ever questioned it beyond one act break. It couldn't be simple or pure enough for the camp followers who'd champion it, nor complex enough for critics of post-Patriot Act America. Therefore, no lasting demo to sustain it.
And a rebuttal from One Who's Been in the Writers' Rooms:
http://seriocity.blogspot.com/2010/04/late-last-night.html
A choice bit:
"So lemme ask -- how would people have responded if this was an anonymous screed? What if all you knew was that it was written by someone who'd created a show, but not who? Or suppose you did know who wrote it but it wasn't DAVID FUCKING MAMET. Instead, it was written by Joe Showrunner, a journeyman who hasn't had the foresight to work in other, more respected media? Would you want to slap him or her? Of course you would. And you would also want to murder him for screaming at you in all caps. "But that's just what Mamet does," people say admirably. Yeah? Well, David Caruso won't cross a threshold. Just because someone with a name does it doesn't mean it's acceptable. It's not.
Look, as far as I'm concerned, there's only one true rule of showrunning: PROTECT YOUR WRITING STAFF. But now I'm going to add another one: DON'T LECTURE TO PROFESSIONALS, OR DO IT ALL YOUR OWN DAMNED SELF. Trust and protect your staff. Keep the show running. Don't think you can control people by making them scared of you, and don't think that lecturing them is going to get their best work. And yes, I chose the caps because I am yelling at David Mamet."
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