Isegoria

Executive producer David Mamet wrote this memo to the writers working on The Unit:

To the writers of the unit:

Greetings.

As we learn how to write this show, a recurring problem becomes clear.

The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. Let me break it down now.

Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time.

Our friends. The penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note:the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

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.

So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.

1) Who wants what?
2) What happens if they 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.

This means all the “little” expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back in the breadline.

Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actors job (the actors job is to be truthful). It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.

Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.

This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene,to failure — this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.

All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.

Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.

Yes but yes but yes but, you say: what about the necessity of writing in all that “information?”

And I respond “figure it out.” Any dickhead with a blue suit can be (and is) taught to say “make it clearer” and “I want to know more about him”.

When you’ve made it so clear that even this blue-suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next, not to explain to them what just happened, or to suggest to them what happens next.

Any dickhead, as above, can write, “but, Jim, if we don’t assassinate the prime minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flame.”

We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.

Yes but, yes but yes but you reiterate.

And I respond figure it out.

How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in their blue suits.

Figure it out.

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.

Look at your log lines. Any logline reading “Bob and Sue discuss…” is not describing a dramatic scene.

Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.

Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.

Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.

Any time any character is saying to another “as you know”, that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air and hire someone to live there for you.

Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing — literally. What are they handling, what are they reading. What are they watching on television, what are they seeing.

If you pretend the characters can’t speak and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.

If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech. You will be forged to work in a new medium — telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting)

This is a new skill. No one does it naturally. You can train yourselves to do it, but you need to start.

I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself “is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?

Answer truthfully.

If the answer is “no” write it again or throw it out. If you’ve got any questions, call me up.

Love, Dave Mamet

Santa Monica 19 October 05

(It is not your responsibility to know the answers, but it is your, and my, responsibility to know and to ask the right questions over and over. Until it becomes second nature. I believe they are listed above.)

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt printed their collection of oblique strategies — aphorisms for creativity — on cards in 1975:

• (Organic) machinery
• A line has two sides
• A very small object — Its centre
• Abandon desire
• Abandon normal instructions
• Accept advice
• Accretion
• Adding on
• Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)
• Always first steps
• Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
• Always the first steps
• Are there sections? Consider transitions
• Ask people to work against their better judgement
• Ask your body
• Assemble some of the elements in a group and treat the group
• Back up a few steps. What else could you have done?
• Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle
• Be dirty
• Be extravagant
• Be less critical more often
• Breathe more deeply
• Bridges — build — burn
• Call your mother and ask her what to do.
• Cascades
• Change ambiguities to specifics
• Change instrument roles
• Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency
• Change specifics to ambiguities
• Children’s voices — speaking — singing
• Cluster analysis
• Consider different fading systems
• Consider transitions
• Consult other sources — promising — unpromising
• Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element
• Courage!
• Cut a vital connection
• Decorate, decorate
• Define an area as `safe’ and use it as an anchor
• Describe the landscape in which this belongs.
• Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing
• Discard an axiom
• Disciplined self-indulgence
• Disconnect from desire
• Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
• Discover your formulas and abandon them
• Display your talent
• Distorting time
• Do nothing for as long as possible
• Do something boring
• Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable
• Do the last thing first
• Do the washing up
• Do the words need changing?
• Do we need holes?
• Don’t avoid what is easy
• Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do
• Don’t be frightened of cliches
• Don’t be frightened to display your talents
• Don’t break the silence
• Don’t stress one thing more than another
• Emphasize differences
• Emphasize repetitions
• Emphasize the flaws
• Faced with a choice, do both
• Feed the recording back out of the medium
• Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation
• Fill every beat with something
• Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
• First work alone, then work in unusual pairs.
• From nothing to more than nothing
• Get your neck massaged
• Ghost echoes
• Give the game away
• Give way to your worst impulse
• Go outside. Shut the door.
• Go slowly all the way round the outside
• Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place
• How would someone else do it?
• How would you explain this to your parents?
• How would you have done it?
• Humanize something that is free of error.
• Idiot glee
• Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar
• Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events
• In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
• Infinitesimal gradations
• Instead of changing the thing, change the world around it.
• Intentions — credibility of — nobility of — humility of
• Into the impossible
• Is it finished?
• Is something missing?
• Is the intonation correct?
• Is the style right?
• Is the tuning appropriate?
• Is the tuning intonation correct?
• Is there something missing?
• It is quite possible (after all)
• It is simply a matter or work
• Just carry on
• Left channel, right channel, centre channel
• List the qualities it has. List those you’d like.
• Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
• Listen to the quiet voice
• Look at a very small object, look at its centre
• Look at the order in which you do things
• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.
• Lost in useless territory
• Lowest common denominator check — single beat — single note — single riff
• Magnify the most difficult details
• Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
• Make it more sensual
• Make what’s perfect more human
• Mechanize something idiosyncratic
• Move towards the unimportant
• Mute and continue
• Not building a wall but making a brick
• Once the search has begun, something will be found
• Only a part, not the whole
• Only one element of each kind
• Overtly resist change
• Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard
• Pay attention to distractions
• Picture of a man spotlighted
• Put in earplugs
• Question the heroic approach
• Remember those quiet evenings
• Remove a restriction
• Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
• Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
• Remove the middle, extend the edges
• Repetition is a form of change
• Retrace your steps
• Revaluation (a warm feeling)
• Reverse
• Short circuit (example; a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)
• Shut the door and listen from outside
• Simple subtraction
• Simply a matter of work
• Slow preparation, fast execution
• Spectrum analysis
• State the problem in words as simply as possible
• Steal a solution.
• Take a break
• Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?
• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance
• Take away the important parts
• Tape your mouth
• The inconsistency principle
• The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
• The tape is now the music
• Think — inside the work — outside the work
• Think of the radio
• Tidy up
• Towards the insignificant
• Trust in the you of now
• Try faking it
• Turn it upside down
• Twist the spine
• Use “unqualified” people.
• Use an old idea
• Use an unacceptable color
• Use cliches
• Use fewer notes
• Use filters
• Use something nearby as a model
• Use your own ideas
• Voice your suspicions
• Water
• What are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving
• What context would look right?
• What do you do? Now, what do you do best?
• What else is this like?
• What is the reality of the situation?
• What is the simplest solution?
• What mistakes did you make last time?
• What most recently impressed you? How is it similar? What can you learn from it? What could you take from it?
• What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?
• What were the branch points in the evolution of this entity
• What were you really thinking about just now? Incorporate
• What would make this really successful?
• What would your closest friend do?
• What wouldn’t you do?
• When is it for? Who is it for?
• Where is the edge?
• Which parts can be grouped?
• Who would make this really successful?
• Work at a different speed
• Would anyone want it?
• You are an engineer
• You can only make one dot at a time
• You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
• Your mistake was a hidden intention

Here Brian Eno discusses the cards:

Eno emphasizes that the list isn’t helpful; you need to be surprised by drawing a random strategy.

I haven’t watched Colbert in quite some time, but I enjoyed this extended bit about getting Daft Punk’d by MTV:

Tim Ferriss interviews Neil Strauss — who’s a seven-time New York Times bestseller — on the creative process:

Imagineer Tony Baxter presents a trove of vintage footage documenting the construction and renovation of Disneyland at the 2011 D23 expo:

Hollywood movies feel formulaic because so many literally follow a formula laid out by Blake Snyder in Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need:

Opening image (p. 1): Sets the tone for the story and suggests the protagonist’s primary problem.

Theme is stated (p. 5): A question or statement, usually made to the protagonist, indicating the story’s main thematic idea.

Set-up (p. 1-10): An introduction to the main characters and setting — the background.

Catalyst (p. 12): A major event that changes the protagonist’s world and sets the story in motion.

Debate (p. 12-25): A question is raised about the choice now before the protagonist. Often this section lays out the stakes for the journey ahead.

Break into Act II (p. 25-30): The hero definitively leaves his old world or situation and enters a strange new one.

B-story (p. 30): A secondary plotline that often fleshes out side characters — frequently a mentor or a love interest — who assist the hero on his journey.

Fun and games (p. 30-55): Snyder says this section offers “the promise of the premise.” It’s an exploration of the story’s core concept that gives the story its “trailer-friendly moments.” It’s usually lighter in tone, and it typically builds to a big victory at the midpoint.

Midpoint (p. 55): The A and B stories cross. The story builds to either a false victory or (less often) false defeat. New information is revealed that raises the stakes.

Bad guys close in (p. 55-75): After the victory at the midpoint, things grow steadily worse as the villains regroup and push forward.

All is lost (p. 75): Mirroring the midpoint, it’s usually a false defeat. The hero’s life is in shambles. Often there’s a major death or at least the sense of death — a reference to dying or mortality somehow.

Dark night of the soul (p. 75-85): A moment of contemplation in which the hero considers how far he’s come and all he’s learned. It’s the moment in which the hero asks, “Why is all this happening?”

Break into Act III (p. 85) A “Eureka!” moment that gives the hero the strength to keep going—and provides the key to success in Act III.

Finale (p. 85-110) Relying on all he has learned throughout the story, the hero solves his problems, defeats the villains, and changes the world for the better.

Final image (p. 110). A mirror of the opening image that underlines the lessons learned and illustrates how the world has changed.

The post-Star Wars Buck Rogers TV show bears little resemblance to the original novella, Armageddon 2419 AD, which is summarized at the beginning of its sequel:

In a previous record of my adventures in the early part of the Second War of Independence I explained how I, Anthony Rogers, was overcome by radioactive gases in an abandoned mine near Scranton in the year 1927, where I existed in a state of suspended animation for nearly five hundred years; and awakened to find that the America I knew had been crushed under the cruel tyranny of the Airlords of Han, fierce Mongolians, who, as scientists now contend, had in their blood a taint not of this earth, and who with science and resources far in advance of those of a United States, economically prostrate at the end of a long series of wars with a Bolshevik Europe, in the year 2270 A.D., had swept down from the skies in their great airships that rode “repeller rays” as a ball rides the stream of a fountain, and with their terrible “disintegrator rays” had destroyed more than four-fifths of the American race, and driven the other fifth to cover in the vast forests which grew up over the remains of the once mighty civilization of the United States.

I explained the part I played in the fall of the year 2419, when the rugged Americans, with science secretly developed to terrific efficiency in their forest fastness, turned fiercely and assumed the aggressive against a now effete Han population, which for generations had shut itself up in the fifteen great Mongolian cities of America, having abandoned cultivation of the soil and the operation of mines; for these Hans produced all they needed in the way of food, clothing, shelter and machinery through electrono-synthetic processes.

I explained how I was adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan, descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbled upon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive rockets, not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the repeller ray columns, which automatically drew the rockets upward where they exploded in the generators of the aircraft; how the Wyomings threw the first thrill of terror into the Airlords by bringing an entire squadron crashing to earth; how a handful of us in a rocketship successfully raided the Han city of Nu-Yok; and how by the application of military principles I remembered from the First World War, I was able to lead the Wyomings to victory over the Sinsings, a Hudson River tribe which had formed a traitorous alliance with the hereditary enemies and oppressors of the White Race in America.

In the future, the Chinese take over? How fanciful!

Behold! The first-look trailer for Disney’s Frozen — which is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen: