Subtext in "Revenge" with Emily VanCamp and Madeline Stowe

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw that Wednesday night I mentioned this scene from ABC's new series Revenge.  This is a perfect example of subtext in dialogue.  Every writer should strive to have subtext, which is the undertone and meaning beneath the dialogue.  It's what the characters aren't saying - but what they mean.  Often a scene with subtext will seem to be about one subject on the surface, but really be conveying a completely different idea or emotion.

Watch the scene and then read below for my explanation of what's going on here.



Okay, the premise of the series is that Emily - played by Emily VanCamp - has returned to the Hamptons fifteen years after her father was betrayed by some of the most powerful people there.  Her father was framed for essentially funding a terrorist act, and everyone who worked at his company testified against him.  Why did they do that you ask?  Because Victoria - played by Madeline Stowe - supposedly masterminded it.

Victoria's the target of Emily's revenge scheme - but before Emily attacks her directly, she aims to destroy everyone around her who was a part of the scheme.  Since "Emily" is actually an identity that Amanda Clarke assumed, Victoria doesn't realize she's having tea with the daughter of the man she destroyed.  However, since "Emily" has taken an interest in her son, she's determined to find out her secrets.

Prior to this scene, Emily had been renting her former childhood home.  In the intervening years, it had passed into the ownership of one of Victoria's close friends.  That woman was Emily's first takedown the week before, which resulted in the house being put on the market.  Emily mentioned to Victoria earlier that she put in an offer - and then later got a call that she was outbid by the tech billionaire/associate who's the only other person who knows who Emily really is.  When Emily confronted him, he revealed that Victoria swooped in and outbid Emily with a cash offer.  Thus, he outbid Victoria with his own offer and then put it in Emily's name.

Victoria doesn't know this at the start of the scene.  She's secure in the belief that she won.  Furthermore, prior to this scene, we saw Emily find out she had the house.  So when she "checks her email" and is excitedly announces her win it's all for Victoria's benefit.  Hence the line, "Thank you so much for tea, Mrs. Grayson.  I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this."

Yeah, I bet you have.  Now with that Cliff Notes set-up of context, do you see the double meaning in many other lines in this scene?

Victoria's subtext is essentially, "You're on my turf, little girl.  Don't think I'm not aware you're hiding something."  Emily's on the other hand is, "Better luck next time, bitch!  I'm gonna enjoy taking you down before you've even realized what's happening."

I should point out that as strong as the writing is, subtext really needs to be in the hands of capable performers who can really sell it.  Here, VanCamp and Stowe play the scene to perfection.  There's just enough awareness of the subtext in their performances without either of them crossing the line and overplaying it.  That's a tricky tightrope to walk.  Lesser actors might have gone slightly broader just to make sure the audience "gets it."  In doing so, it would have compromised the reality that Victoria doesn't realize exactly what Emily's pulling here. 

VanCamp has to sell that she's tossing darts at Victoria without making the attack obvious, and Stowe has to sell that she thinks she's being subtle and that she doesn't notice the additional layer behind Emily's words.  The result is probably my favorite scene of the week, and watching these two actresses spar is like watching two tennis pros in their prime.  If Revenge keeps serving up scenes like this, consider me hooked.

So far Revenge is one of the best new shows this season.  Check it out if you haven't already.

Deservedly deleted scenes - Sucker Punch

I'm sure I've talked before about how "Deleted Scenes" can be an excellent learning experience for writers.  If you watch that section of most DVDs you'll often come away thinking "Yeah, I can see why they cut that."  It's a short hop from that realization to understanding how a scene needs to move the story forward.

If you're smart, you can then turn around and apply that insight to your own script.  So let's look at a deleted scene I came across recently.  It's from Sucker Punch, which I lambasted in three separate blog posts.  And true, the theatrical version of the film isn't exactly the model of coherence either - but this scene seems to exist in its own reality.



There are a number of reasons I can surmise that this scene was cut.  First, it's shot and edited like a music video.  Other parts of the film are frentically edited, but this sequence really feels like an MTV video.  It's not really telling a story - it's just a montage.

Related to that, there really isn't a point of view to the sequence.  Everything else in Sucker Punch is essentially from Baby Doll's perspective.  I'm not sure who's perspective this sequence belongs to.

It's also four minutes of screentime that doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.  Yes, we see the girls perform in individual dances, but those dances seem to have nothing to do with the girls' individual personalites or arcs.  If they were going to to the trouble of giving each girl a dance solo, it feels like a missed opportunity not to have the dance or the music reflect something relevent to them specifically.

(There's also the fact that I don't understand why the two characters played by Carla Gallo and Oscar Isaac are performing the song themselves.  They're the people behind the scenes - not the talent.)

So I put it to you, does this scene seem to make any sense on its own?  And to those of you who saw Sucker Punch, does it add anything to the overall experience?

Tuesday Talkback - Openings that sold you on the movie immediately

I saw Drive that past weekend after having managed avoid finding out ANYTHING about it beyond the fact that seemingly everyone who saw the film raved about it.  It's rare I get to go into a film that unmolested by spoilers and reviews, and I have to admit, it was kind of fun.

I knew that this was my kind of movie partway through the opening sequence, when it became apparent that we weren't going to see the "getaway" shot or executed in the conventional "chase scene" sense. (I'm being deliberately vague in the hopes that some readers will have their curiosity piqued and be motivated to check it out themselves.)  I didn't care what came next - that opening had me.  It earned my complete faith and trust in the filmmakers.

What opening sequences have accomplished that for you?

Avoid Tunnel Vision

I think one thing that every writer should strive to avoid is tunnel vision.

It's easy to fall in love with a story idea.  In fact, it helps the writing if you love what you're doing.  That passion can carry you far and motivate you to stay up many a late night to work on your script.  The problem can set in when you become so fixated that you forget the larger context in which your script has to exist.

In other words: at the end of this, someone has to buy the script.

The writing needs to have appeal beyond your narrow, "Well I've always wanted to tell this story."  If your passion is 18th century colonial shuffleboard, you might find it hard to attach a backer who's equally passionate.  It might be the best damn colonial shuffleboard script ever written, but what does that matter if there's no market for it - or no one who will even read it?

That's an extreme example, though.  What about a script where some young male writer uses the premise to explore his unusual sexual fetishes?  I've read more of those than I care to know.  The same with stories from people treating their own lives as fan-fiction.  In these, the lead characters lives are full of misery.  Their parents hate them, people are mean to them for no reason, their boss tries to rape them, their landlord robs them blind, their kids hate them - or have a terminal illness - and society seems out to get them.  Through it all, any sympathy for this lead is erased by the shrill and obnoxious way they whine about how hard life is and how they need to get through it.

This is usually solved by the character meeting their perfect, too-good-to-be-true mate and then getting a windfall of cash in an unbelievable way.  If you're dealing with a real hack, they'll have their character win the lotto and solve all their problems that way.

Sure, you want to write it, but is that really the kind of movie someone wants to see?  Is that the sort of movie YOU'D go see if given an option?  I've know a few writers who love a particular genre of movie, but then write a completely different kind of film!


It's always great when you can finish a script, but knowing what that script can do for you in the end is also important.

TV Fact Checker: A look at the job of Parks & Recreation's writer's assistant and script coordinator

Wired has a great article about Parks & Recreation's writer's assistant/script coordinator Greg Levine, who also happens to be a regular reader of this blog.  It's worth a read, not only for it's look at a day in the life of a writer's assistant, but also for yet another "how I got the job" story.

How did you come to be the research guy on Parks and Rec?

“When the writer’s strike happened, I wound up in casting…. When it ended I was still there and this company happened to be casting The Office, so I got to know the people there. They said, ‘Hey we’re going to do a new show, do you want to come on board as a writer’s assistant?’… Very early on there were only a few of us on the show. It was just Greg Daniels, Mike Schur, the line producer and myself, really. 

"Mike and Greg would constantly work on stories for the pilot and they would come to me and say, ‘We need to know every step it takes to build a park.’ So, we knew we were going to set the show in Indiana, so I called a few parks-and-rec departments in Indiana and tried to talk to people who were willing to chat. And after talking to several people, I was able to pull together the 30-step process it takes to build a park.” 

What’s your typical day like?

"Myself and the other writer’s assistant are in the writer’s room taking notes, keeping a running log of every joke or story idea pitched in the room. And then at the end of every day we keep them organized by story, so if we want to jump back to Story X we can jump back and I have those notes ready for them. That’s one component. 

"Another is that as script coordinator, we publish every script. We keep a running, fully formatted, production-ready script. The research flows in and out of both of those. Sometimes I’m proofreading a script and catch something. I remember the first time DMV came up. I said, ‘I don’t think DMV is universal across all 50 states.’ So we checked and sure enough it’s BMV in Indiana.”

Check out the rest of the article at Wired.com.

Life in the trenches as an intern

This one goes out to a relative of mine who's getting her first taste of interning in the entertainment business.  It's an actual entry from my journal from... a few years ago when I was doing an internship at an Oscar-winning production company.....

As it's a little profane in spots even for this blog, I've replaced a certain offensive word with another.  See if you can figure out what it is.

---------------------------

It’s hard being a Smurfing intern in a Smurfing office where they give you Smurfing menial tasks and treat them with the same Smurfing weight as the Smurfing tasks that actually Smurfing matter.  Especially when the Smurfing menial tasks come from the Number 2 person at the Smurfing office and there for carry more Smurfing weight than the more Smurfing relevant tasks from Smurfing people lower on the Smurfing totem pole.

As part of my Smurfing job I’m working the Smurfing reception desk.  This entails answering the Smurfing phone, greeting the guests, helping out with the Smurfing mail, making Smurfing copies and doing whatever Smurfing tasks the Smurfing assistants ask of me.

The Smurfing problem comes in when there is a Smurfing conflict among the Smurfing tasks.

Task 1: An assistant needs several pages copied out of a book.  No Smurfing problem, you say?  The catch: he doesn’t want the dark crease that appears in the spine when you Xerox from a book and he doesn’t want the black lines that outline when the pages ended.  The pages have to be perfectly white, too… no gray colors that often result from copying.

This means each page must be copied once, to obtain a flat “master.”  Then we must use the settings to crop the master as it is Xeroxed and also lighten the pages.  There was a fair amount of trial and error involved in this, especially in making sure that the initial copies weren’t crooked.

That process took some 30 minutes to work out, and two of us were working on it.

Adding to some confusion was that he gave us another copying assignment at the same time and told us that he needed that on 3-hole punched paper.  The other intern assumed this meant that both assignments were to be on 3-holed paper, so we chose that paper tray.

Backing up a little bit, at the height of our confusion, one of the assistants came over to us holding part of a plastic bread sack.  I should specify that this assistant’s job is to handle the personal errands of the Number 2 person at my workplace.  I’ll say it again:  he is paid to handle personal errands.  The interns are not paid, but it’s generally understood that our tasks should be office related, or at the very least, office tasks get priority.

This is complicated by the fact that this person is the assistant for one of the more powerful people.  Therefore, all tasks related to this person, no matter how menial, are to be given priority.  Still, this person has two assistants to handle the tasks.  So in theory, there should be little that trickles down to us.

Yeah, right.

But I’m getting off track… back to the bread sack…

“Uh guys, we need one of you to make some calls to some stores, and find out who carries this kind of bread.  Try [Overrated Store #1] or [Overrated Store #2] and… well… any other place you can think of.  It’s really important.”

Suffice it to say, the place where I work has nothing to do with bread.  This isn’t a business errand.  And, yeah, they don’t pay me, but they also don’t pay me to do that.

I wait three beats, give him the “you have got to be Smurfing joking” look, and say, “It might be a while.”

You see, by this point there were at least five other major requests for copies, and all of them had to be done fast.  Plus the mail needed to be taken down the street and the other intern is the only one permitted to do that.  This left me as the only one to do the final steps of copying “Task 1.” 

Let me explain something about the copiers where I work.  You have to input a code correspondent to the person you are doing the copies for.  If the machine is left idle for a few minutes, it automatically logs out and resets all the settings.  This posed a problem, as we didn’t want to lose the specifications we’d spent half an hour working to figure out.  But the mail was due for pickup soon, and we still had all those other copies to do.  The only option was for me to do those copies while the other intern ran down the street.

Unfortunately, I still had to cover the reception desk and answer the phone, meaning I spent about fifteen minutes constantly running back and forth between the front desk and the copy room like a chicken with my head cut off. 

Somehow I get it done and juggled, and just as the other intern returns, the copies are done.  (Not all of them, just Task 1).  He rushes them upstairs, and I take a breath before figuring out how to accommodate the other requests.

It is in this brief respite that the other assistant for Number 2 walks over and sees the bread wrapping.  She asks, “Did you track this down?”  Patiently, perhaps too patiently, I explain that there are a lot of things we’ve been assigned and we’re nowhere near catching up.  “It could be a while,” I tell her.  She takes it and disappears into her office area.  For a moment, I’m foolish enough to think that I’ve been relieved of that task.

Two minutes later, the other assistant shows up.  “Have you guys called these places yet?”  (You see how it works:  She kicked him, so he has to kick me.)  So I explain it again, stopping just short of saying that this is a prime example of why there should be a real receptionist here rather than assigning an intern to “play receptionist.” 

He seems disappointed, but I’d feel a lot guiltier if I didn’t know the guy has a habit of dumping these tasks and making them sound like a priority when there are more important things to be done.  He walks off again.

The other intern returns.  “Uh, I screwed up.  He didn’t want these three hole punched.  We have to do them again.”

Now this isn’t as simple as just running it through the copier, because the holes will leave black marks on the side of the copies.  I think you can see where this is going.

Yep. We have to start all over again on these copies.  There’s another 20 minutes wasted.

It gets better.  Remember how I said the mail had to go out earlier?  Well, now someone who wasn’t paying attention at mail call needs something sent out, so I have to send the intern out again before the next and final pickup in 30 minutes.

Once more I play the headless chicken.  Cluck, cluck.

And it’s here that the phone starts ringing off the hook.  Usually I just have to transfer people, so it’s not taxing in that sense, but it’s impossible to juggle all these tasks at once.

An hour or so later, we’re finally caught up.  I can almost smell the other assistant coming with the bread bag again when I’m given another office related task.  So I spend an hour on this mind-numbing chore, but at least get to avoid the humiliation of calling around asking for bread.

Maybe, maybe, if I was getting paid I’d have a bit more of a sense of humor about it.  For now I’m telling myself it’ll pay off when I sell this story as a sitcom script.

Tuesday Talkback: Which show improved the most from pilot to its eventual heights?

Fall TV premieres are in full swing and that means pilot episodes galore. Shows are under intense pressure to hook audiences immediately. Audiences are fickle and networks have itchy trigger fingers. A weak pilot (that somehow managed to get ordered to series for one reason or another) could spell doom for a series - especially if the show doesn't improve in a hurry.

But some of TV's biggest success stories have been shows that took a while to find their audience. Cheers - despite getting off to a creatively strong start - was dead last in the ratings for all shows in its debut year. Seinfeld not only had low ratings and a very short initial order of four episodes, but it's pilot episode frankly wasn't all that funny. It definately took the show a while to find its voice. In fact, I might say that it ranks as one of the series that improved most from its pilot to its glory days.

So what's your pick for a series that started slow but eventually became awesome?