Webshow: Voiceover

Going in concert with a Scott Myers post that goes live later today, today's video deals with when and when not to use voiceover.  There's conventional wisdom that voiceover is a lazy crutch that good writers shouldn't use. Is that accurate?

Reader questions: Day 3

Robert asks:

What's your take on having v.o. in the opening image? Understand it's not being used as blatant exposition but rather to give a bit of backstory and set the tone. It's also the only v.o. in the script. I ask because it really works in the context of the script but there seems to be a universal rule out there to not to have v.o. in the opening image of a spec script.

Well, you earn a few points for it being used to set the tone more than exposition, but then you lose some by saying it's the only voiceover in the script. Though it is a bit funny that you say it's not for blatant exposition, but rather to give backstory. Backstory and exposition are virtually synonymous.

My feeling on this is that it always seems strange to me when a movie opens with voiceover and then doesn't revisit it at all over the course of the story. I'd need to see it in context to really evaluate this, but my question to you would be: Would the script suffer for removing it? Is it essential, or is it an indulgence?

If I open a script and the first thing I see is voiceover, I'm going to expect that particular character to remain as the narrator and that narration to be used throughout the script. Now if it's an omniscient narrator, then my "exposition alert" really will go off. I'm sure that people will point out professional examples of this - "War of the Worlds" comes to mind - but be cautioned that it can read awkwardly.

Scott queries:

A big fan of your blog, and I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions if you do not mind.

1) The generally accepted wisdom has been that if you want to make it as a feature film writer, you need to live in LA. Is that still true?

To get established as a Hollywood writer, you pretty much have to live here. If you're going to try to get your script in front of agents you're seeking representation with, or producers you're hoping to sell to, you'll need to be able to meet them face-to-face. Email and phone meetings won't be enough. The few instances of people being able to sell their script and still live in Peoria are the exception. Plus, even after you sell your first spec, you'll want to stay out here in order to take meetings for rewriting your work and other work-for-hire projects.

2) If you live overseas like I do, would you recommend moving to LA to get started, or is the economy so bad that I should wait until it picks up before moving?

The economy is so terrible that I'd advise anyone with a semi-stable lifestyle to sit tight and wait for it to pick up. The job market in LA is in terrible shape, both in and out of the industry, so it can be hard to find ways to support yourself. Since you're coming from abroad with presumably few contacts, I'd say that would be doubly true in your case.

If you somehow are able to either arrange a job situation before you move across the pond, or if you have a very understanding friend in LA who either needs a roommate or is amiable to letting you crash on his couch, then it MIGHT be feasible to move here. Might.

And before you move, make sure you've got enough money saved to support yourself for at least six to eight months without a job.

Noreen wrote:

Things I read on your blog and others have led me to conclude that male and female readers like different things. Duh!

Example, I read female readers don't like graphic sex scenes and they think the writer is creepy, then I read a male reader say the sex scenes are not graphic enough for him and pls pile on the explicit details.

Should I pander to a male or female reader?

I'm in a bind here because I've never heard of a male reader saying that the sex scenes aren't graphic. I have seen plenty of examples of readers - male and female - rolling their eyes and flat out laughing at sex scenes overwritten to the point of reading like a bad romance novel. Those are the kinds of passages that often provoke a reader to stop what they're doing, walk across the office and show the scene to their friends, saying "You've got to read this."

I've covered my own feelings on these sorts of scenes twice before.

As far as choosing which gender to pander to, that never even enters my mind as a writer. I don't think it's as easy as saying "Male readers like this, but women like this." Write in the least skeevy, least awkward way.

That's it for the questions, folks. Don't be shy about sending in more.

The worst query submission I ever had to read

Over the years, I've read thousands of scripts and I can tell you where most of them have ended up - in the circular file. However, every now and then I get a script so hilariously, unbelievably bad that I have to save it for posterity. There's one such script that I have held onto for well over five years at this point. To be honest, I'm not sure how it made its way into the company I was working for at the time. It has all the earmarks of a "slush pile" script, and yet, somehow it got to an assistant who didn't take this sort of thing.

My theory has always been that she requested the script so she could use it to torture me.

It's hard to know where to begin with this abomination, so I'll just describe it the way a professional reader would see it. The first thing you'd notice is that the script is significantly thicker than most other screenplays. A quick flip to the back page will confirm that it is just shy of 160 pages in length - about 40 pages and 33% longer than the accepted norm!

You would also notice that the first fifteen or so pages bound in the script are not actually part of the script. Beneath the cover page is a Table of Contents, that helpfully explains that there is an Introduction, an Overview, and a section on "marketing considerations." These marketing considerations include "observations" on the particular cultural subset depicted in the film, as well as the "Author's Commitment to Marketing."

I'll say this now - as the screenwriter, it's not your job to tell the producers and marketing department how to market their film. Yes, you need to give them something marketable, but then shut up and let them do their jobs.

Oh, and the writer also included several pages of reviews from their last book. (Self-published, of course.)

The page and a half cover letter helpfully informs the executive that the film was inspired by a true story, and then leads into a long uninteresting anecdote about a conversation the writer had which inspired the film. The second paragraph details how this screenplay was first written as a novel and then adapted by the author. The author suggests that "This is a perfect vehicle for Halle Berry, and we already know what she looks like in tight, black latex... though there are others who work as well." In case you don't know this, NEVER offer casting suggestions in a cover letter. Let the casting people do their job.

The next paragraph says that though the script is a little long, that's mostly because of the long descriptions of the settings and actions, and the writer estimates that the film will be more than two hours and fifteen minutes. This is also the point where the writer casually mentions that several scenes are a direct riff on an existing and well-known novel - to the point that several characters assume the identities of the other author's characters.

Oh, and as we get to page two of the cover letter, the author says that all her friends have responded well to the script and again she mentions the research on marketing that they themselves gathered.

But the author still hasn't shut up - there's yet another page! An addendum to the cover letter. It starts with "I forgot to mention how much research went into this script," and then spends three paragraphs singling out specific scenes and essentially saying little more than, "Someone told me this stuff in an interview."

So finally, after I've stopped laughing so hard that my throat is sore, I peel back the real cover page. I'm not greeted with "FADE IN" as I should be. No, I still have to get past a one-page list suggesting possible cast members for the eight lead roles.

Seriously, days like that don't just make me hate my job. They make me hate writers.

Now I'm going to tell you the first two words in the first two paragraphs of the script:

1) "CAMERA PANS"
2) "CAMERA MOVES"

Never, ever, EVER, NEVER direct in the screenplay! At this point I pretty much know all I should need to know. It's utter amateur hour. Not only can I be assured that the writer has no clue what they're doing, I can already tell from the pitch that this is not something that my bosses would ever go for. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times when I had the luxury of simply going back to my bosses and telling them what I told you. It had been made clear to me that I had to read the whole thing.

This script was wretched. There was excessive voice-over narration throughout, insanely overly detailed description, including a healthy serving of "unfilmables." (For those not in the know, "unfilmables" are what we call information in the description that cannot possibly be shown visually. For instance, if the description tells us that Bobby has been emotionally crippled ever since his mom died in his arms when he was 8, that's bad writing. If we need to know that, it should come out through dialogue or action. Putting it in the description means that the only people who will know this are those reading the script.)

There were also a number of graphic sex scenes that, if filmed as described, would have earned the movie an NC-17 easily.

This thing is utter garbage. It's not the most offensive spec script I've ever read, but it's definitely in my Top 5 Worst, if not THE worst. I keep it as a reminder to never make the mistakes that writer did. Plus, every now and then it's good for a laugh.

Pros can break the rules - Zombieland

I saw Zombieland this weekend without knowing much more than was revealed in the commercials, and if at all possible, I urge all of my readers to see the film in the same fashion. This is a movie that's greatly enhanced by not knowing about certain surprises along the way. Trust me.

The cast of Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin were all fantastic in their roles as the last few humans left to fend for themselves in a zombie apocalypse. It was a rare time I didn't think of Eisenberg as a poor man's Michael Cera. However, as I was watching it, I couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that the filmmakers did several things that are usually on the list of "DON'Ts" offered up to aspiring screenwriters. Now, the difference between those filmmakers and the aspiring writers is that they used these indulgences carefully enough that they didn't (usually) feel like hack-writer gimmicks. Like they say, you have to know the rules before you can break them.

So what are the "screenwriting sins" in Zombieland?

1) voiceover narration. I have to admit, I rolled my eyes a little when the film started with a long expository voiceover from Jesse Eisenberg's character Columbus. It's basically a major exposition dump about how the status quo of "Zombieland" came to be, complete with the "rules" for surviving ZOMBIELAND. It's the sort of thing that works better in the film than it probaby did on the page, and the filmmakers managed to avoid the traps that first-timers usually fall into with this.

For starters, the narration is that of a main character and it immediately establishes not only backstory, but that character's particular voice. I've read a lot of spec scripts where the writer clearly had no idea how to set up his complicated world and its backstory, so he resorted to an anonymous narrator. If your narrator isn't a character in the story, and he speaks in a dry voice, my HACK ALARM is going to go off by page 2. While first-time writers are often advised not to use narration, there are several films in recent years that have used narration well - such as Sin City and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. Notice what they have in common - they're narrated by characters and not anonymous narrators. (They also happen to be in genres where narration doesn't stand out - pulply, noirish type stories.)

I suppose someone might throw the TV series Pushing Daisies as a counterexample of narration by a non-character. To that, I'd say it' s the exception that proves the rule and I'd point out that that narrator is a character in his own right with a voice as distinct as any of the flesh-and-blood players.

But getting back to Zombieland, it helps that the narration is genuinely funny. People will forgive a lot if you can make them laugh, and the voiceover is complimented well by the visuals. It's Filmmaking 101 - don't just have us listening to some guy prattle on - engage all the senses.

In spite of those virtues, the use of voiceover isn't flawless. For one thing, there's a major imbalance. Columbus gasses on a lot at the start of the film, especially in the first ten minutes and then the narration becomes a lot sparser. This is usually something that trips a HACK ALERT because it becomes apparent the VO was just there to get the exposition in. In scripts that badly use narration, you'll often notice that the voiceover will disappear for much of the second act. My solution might have been to tighten up some of the exposition at the start so that the lesser VO later wouldn't be as noticeable.

2) Gratuitous celebrity cameo - First, fear not. I shall not reveal the name of the actor or actress who make an appearance as himself or herself. I had no idea this cameo was coming when I saw the film and it made the joke much, MUCH funnier.

The celebrity cameo is something that usually makes my eyes roll in a spec script, mostly because my first thought is "What happens to this scene if Alan Thicke says 'no?'" This sort of gimmick got popular after Neil Patrick Harris popped up as himself in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and stole the movie. Now, you could say that if NPH had turned down the cameo, they just would have offered it to Fred Savage or Jaleel White. As true as that is, I think it's a risk when you put something like this in your spec.

The way I see it, throwing in a celebrity is a lot like specifically naming an expensive song for your musical montage. Suddenly, you're mandating elements that could back the producers into a corner. If your joke is crucial to the second act climax, and it only works if Dean Cain shows up in Superman tights and reveals he really can fly... well, you might be setting up a difficult problem to solve if Dean decides he doesn't want to play ball - or he will, but only if he gets paid through the nose.

On top of that, a lot of celebrity cameos usually feel like weak attempts to just get a laugh out of how out of context the appearance is. I'll admit, I enjoyed when William Shatner played himself (or at least a version of himself) in Free Enterprise, but Bruce Willis' cameo in Ocean's Twelve was just painful to watch. You could literally feel the filmmakers elbowing the audience in the ribs saying, "Well? Well? Aren't we clever?"

Zombieland pulls their cameo off well. In part because the tone of the movie is so heightened that this departure doesn't feel like too much of a tangent. Plus, it's not a star who does a lot of these cameos, so the appearance felt fresh. On top of that, this character's final line might be the best one in the movie - and like I said, a lot can be forgiven if it's funny.

3) Characters do stupid things solely to advance the plot. Watch out, I'm gonna have to blow some of the ending here, folks.

It's been established that our merry band of survivors has managed to last about three or four weeks, I believe. That suggests these people have been generally smart about how they operate in this world - which is why I cannot believe the idiocy that happens when two characters end up in a theme park.

I refuse to believe that they'd not realize that turning on all the lights would be like a beacon to the zombies.

I refuse to believe that they wouldn't even at least try to block the gates to impede zombie entry.

I refuse to believe that once they realized the zombies were coming, that their brilliant escape involves getting onto one of those Tower Power rides from which there is no escape. They shoot into the air - but all that can happen after that is they come down after the zombies have had an even greater chance to increase their numbers.

I refuse to believe that another character has enough ammo to take out the zombies who descend on his (much better fortified) position.

Yet as each of these details popped up and those moments caused me to (inwardly) say "Oh come on!" I found it in my heart to forgive the plot turns. In part, this is because the movie is goofy enough fun that it's the rare case where "It's just a movie" doesn't feel like a huge band-aid to a very good logistical question.

Maybe I could rationalize them turning on all the lights as them getting caught up in the moment after weeks under siege. I might even excuse the second mistake for the same reasons. The next bad choice could be written off as panic, even though that's hard to believe at this point. However, the thing that really convinced me to let this go is that I really felt like this was the kind of movie where it could have ended with one or all of the characters getting killed. I didn't immediately see an implausible survival as the only option, so I remained emotionally engaged in the characters' fates right up until the end. Had the movie not been so gruesome in other places, I would have known that there's no way any of the characters were in any real danger, and thus, I probably would have called bullshit from the start of that sequence.

Characters are human - they're just as capable of making bad choices as real people are. If it can be helped, either don't have too many of these contrivances in succession - or have a character make a really dumb choice that throws them off their game and show them making reckless mistakes as they attempt to fix that first mistake. That's part of the reason I didn't come down too hard on the movie.

But the real reason I didn't let it ruin the movie for me was this - the rest of the film was so well done that I was thoroughly engaged with the story at that point. Had something pulled me out of the movie sooner, had there been some ridiculous contrivance that could not be ignored, I probably would have seen the amusement park scene as the last straw. So take this as a lesson - if your logic gets sloppy in the third act, make sure the first two acts are near-airtight.

There's a famous story about Jaws novelist Peter Benchley telling Steven Spielberg that the ending of Jaws was ridiculous - that it was impossible to blow up a shark in that fashion. Spielberg supposedly said, "If I have them in the palm of my hand for two hours, I'll be able to do whatever I want in the last five minutes." And he was right. Audiences still cheer today when the shark meets its fate.

However, the key to that is... you have to have the audience firmly for the entire film up to that point. Never forget that if you sense you're cheating in your own writing. If you're gonna blow up a shark with a scuba tank, make damn sure I'm invested in the characters and heard them sing "Show me the way to go home."

Lessons from bad movies - "The Spirit"

This weekend I Netflixed a film I knew better than to spend $12 on when it was in wide release - Frank Miller's The Spirit. I'd seen the presentation for this film at last year's Comic Con, where one previewed scene played so horribly to the audience that the producer was practically apologizing for it after running the clip. I knew I shouldn't spend theatre prices on this turkey, but it immediately earned a place in my Netflix queue.

Most of the major critics took their shots at this one back when it first came out, so I'm not going to waste time with a broad review. Also, I've never really followed the Will Eisner comic upon which this is based, so I can't speak too deeply to the film's fidelity to the source material. Still even with the limited exposure I've had to the comics, I can tell that visually, the film looks nothing like Eisner's vision. It looks more like... well... Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.

In comparing the two, you can get a sense of where Miller went wrong here. For all of its demerits - and there are many - The Spirit is a very visually strong film. There are the usual Miller motifs, and he certainly knows how to compose a shot. (Not surprising since Miller's been working in the visual medium of comic books for about thirty years.) This is one of the best-looking bad movies I've seen. I know a lot of people derided the style as a Sin City rip-off, but Miller really is just ripping off himself - and a few Eisner visuals shown in the DVD supplements suggest that Eisner worked in a similar style on some of his later projects.

What's wrong in The Spirit? Just about everything else - starting with the script. I'll give a brief mea culpa here. Back in the summer of '04, a development exec I read for got a copy of the Sin City script and allowed me to read it. At the time I hadn't read the comics, but I was well aware of the creator's reputation. I peeled back the cover page, eager to see how the story had been adapted.

I got about ten pages in before I tossed the script aside and wrote it off as a dud. It felt like the vast majority of those ten pages were made up of over-written visual description and especially over-written voiceover narration. I figured there was no way it would work. About ten months later, when the film came out, I had a healthy serving of crow. The two directors made the narration work - incorporating it in a way that really complimented the noir style they were emulating.

Given that, I can understand why no one immediately cried foul when The Spirit proved to have an equally prolific inner monologue. The problem: his inner monologue isn't always inner. There are scenes that start with The Spirit's narration, only to then shift to him talking to himself out loud. This was one of the early slips that pulled me out of the film. Narration might be intrusive, but if you can get the audience to accept it as a part of the style, don't change horses in mid-stream. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why The Spirit voices some thoughts out loud and ruminates internally in others. Given a choice between the two, I'd argue it's less intrusive to go with voiceover. That way there isn't the strangeness of a character talking just so the audience can hear him.

The script also suffers from a plot so dull it's not even worth recounting. There's a fairly mundane set-up early on that ends up pitting two antagonists against each other, with The Spirit conflicted because one antagonist is his former love and the other has a hidden connection to his own immortality. This is one of those movies where the characters end up stopping frequently to explain the plot and motivations to each other - and here's where Miller exposes his limitations as a writer and director. Exposition scenes are overwritten, some set-ups are awkwardly paced only so the story can advance, and the blocking in these talky scenes is often reminiscent of a bad high school play.

Which brings us to the element that truly brings this film down - the acting. I'd argue that only two actors escape this debacle unscathed - Dan Lauria and Samuel L. Jackson. Lauria does the impossible - he somehow finds the exact right note between camp and serious in the cliched role of the hard-boiled police commissioner. It's over the top in all the right ways, even as virtually every other actor stumbles badly when Miller directs them to be broad. Jackson escapes only by virtue of being Jackson.

Again I draw a comparison to Sin City, where Miller and Rodriguez had the advantage of having strong actors like Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro, and Bruce Willis in their corner. However, for me, the real shock was how they got solid performances out of actors who generally aren't that good. Jessica Alba might be considered one of the sexiest women alive, but her acting has never been all that impressive - yet amazingly, she turned in a surprisingly vulnerable and likable performance. Brittany Murphy is one of the most annoying actresses alive, so bad that she'll make your eyes and ears bleed - and somehow she totally blended into Sin City's style. Even Rosario Dawson stood out, despite having given few notable performances prior to that. At least one of the directors knew how to get through to these often-uneven players... and from The Spirit, I think it's safe to say that was Rodriguez.

Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and especially Stana Katic all give performances so bad that they would be career-ending if it wasn't for their sex appeal and the fact it's clear that all of this is Miller's fault. I don't know if there are enough adjectives to adequately convey just how terrible their acting is. The amazing thing is you can completely see what they're going for, even as it's obvious just how badly they missed the target.

Let this be a lesson to all writers - great actors can sometimes save even your weak material. The right material can even elevate your actors... but when an actor tanks a performance that's all the audience will see. Few people watch an awkward scene and think, "Wow that was well-written, the actor just blew it." More likely, they'll think "This movie sucks, this actor sucks," or "this script sucks." Like I said earlier, the script certainly didn't do the actors any favors here, but the dialogue was stylized enough that the right actors might have been able to minimize the damage - had they found the right note in their performances. That's the risk you take when you write highly-stylized dialogue.

Granted, the film suffers from further problems, where logic seems to take a total vacation. My favorite example of this comes with the Spirit is captured by the Octopus. Our hero wakes up in a room decorated with Nazi motifs, and his captors are soon revealed in Nazi uniforms - except for his torturer - a woman dressed as an Arabian belly dancer, though she turns out to be a French woman named "Plaster of Paris." Then, just as you're trying to make sense of this odd cultural melting pot, it dawns on you that this "French" woman is played by Spanish actress Paz Vega.

Blame the visuals all you want for that one, but every one of those odd choices was probably made at the script level - save for the casting of Paz Vega. And even if it wasn't, Miller wrote and directed the film, meaning that all of this HAD to be his vision. It plays like a weird exercise in multiculturalism.

I can't offer any one macro lesson from this turkey, but there are plenty of little lessons to be gleaned. Some problems might be visible at the script level, and others might not become evident until actors actually say their lines out loud.

To recap:
1) Don't switch between narration and having a character talk to himself. If you're gonna go for the narration cheat, embrace it whole-hog.

2) Don't overcomplicate the plot solely through dialogue.

3) Keep exposition efficient. In the cases where you can't, don't just have the characters pace back-and-forth. Give them something visually interesting to do.

4) With the right direction, even bad actors can find the proper tone for your stylized story. Make sure the script isn't so stylized that it strands them with one-note characters.

5) Make sure there's a logic to the set design and wardrobe you specify. If your villain wears a Nazi uniform for kicks, make sure we know what that's supposed to say about his character - especially when there's no consistency between that and the rest of his wardrobe.

I'll conclude with this - it feels like several decisions could have been made at the script stage that would have minimized the damage in the execution... but then we would have had merely a boring film instead of an awesomely bad one.