As the movie landscape continues to nosedive, my desperate search for something, anything, to watch continues. This weekend, I hit an all-time low. I found my finger painstakingly scrolling down the Netflix queue where it landed on “To All The Boys Always and Forever Part 3.” As the highlight box surrounded the film, I almost – ALMOST – pressed “okay.” Don’t worry, though. Cooler heads prevailed and I clicked away – far far away from any Boys Always Being Loved.
Luckily for me, I got one of those recommendations that happened to be something that had been recommended to me before. A movie on Hulu called “In and Of Itself.” Which is usually a sign that something is good – if two unrelated parties are suggesting it to you. Not gonna lie. It looked pretty weird. But desperate times call for desperate measures. So I restarted my Hulu subscription and off I went.
In and Of Itself mirrors what they did with Hamilton. A guy was doing a one-man show in New York that played for over 500 nights. The play then became so popular, that he taped one of the performances and sold it to Hulu.
The show/play/movie/performance/documentary immediately shows its hand, establishing that it’s not like anything you’ve seen before. The unassuming mild-mannered orator, whose name I don’t know, proceeds to tell us a story about a guy named the “Rouleteesta.”
The Rouleteesta was a gentleman so lost after having returned from war that he would do anything to feel alive again. So he entered a highly illegal underground game of Russian roulette. Yes, this was real Russian roulette. With an audience. And it was so popular that everyone would come in to bet big on the winners and losers.
Now, every contestant who played this game only played once. Because if you lost, you’re dead. And if you won, you got paid a handsome fortune. This game brought in a lot of desperate people who needed money. Once they got that money, they weren’t dancing with the devil a second time. Not so for the Rouleteesta. After winning that first night, he came back the very next night to play again. People thought he was crazy. And maybe he was. But that didn’t matter. After he won a second time, he came back a third.
And when people started to doubt him – assuming he figured out a way to cheat the system – he insisted that they put TWO bullets in the chamber instead of one. Let’s up the stakes, baby. And even with two bullets, when the Rouleteesta pulled the trigger, he was still alive to tell the tale.
I should inform you at this moment that our stage the orator is on has, behind it, on the wall, six windows, each of which holds a lit display. In the top left display is an artistic rendition of a rouleteesta puppet. And whenever we hear about another night of Russian roulette, the puppet mimics the motion of putting the gun to his head and, ‘click,’ surviving.
Back to the Rouleteesta. After the the two-bullet gimmick wore off, the fearless Rouleteesta says, fine, I’ll put three bullets in the chamber! At this point, he’s up to a 50/50 shot of blowing his brains out. But he’s the Rouleteesta! And despite several nights of holding a half-loaded gun to his head and pulling the trigger, the Rouleteesta continued to survive!
So he adds a fourth bullet. And then a fifth bullet! And after surviving night after night, he finally demands that they put a SIXTH BULLET in the gun. That would mean the gun was loaded! And so on that night, with everyone betting against the Rouleteesta, figuring even he couldn’t outsmart a loaded gun, you know what happened?
I’m not going to tell you.
You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.
Believe it or not, I’m not trying to anger you. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m trying to help you. You see, me stopping the story before I give you the ending was done to make my first point about storytelling today.
Which is what all of you screenwriters do, by the way. You tell a story. Every time you write a screenplay. Every time you write an act. Every time you write a scene. You’re telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if, at any point, you were to stop telling that story, your reader should be furious with you. Just like you’re upset that I didn’t finish this story.
Think about it. If you’re writing a screenplay and, at any time, you could take the screenplay away from the reader, and they aren’t upset with you, you’ve failed. If they’re like, “Yeah, I’m fine whether I know what happened or not,” you’ve failed. You must design every story you tell in a manner that makes the reader furious should that story be taken away from them.
And I don’t think 95% of writers write that way. I think they write on their time, on their schedule, and never once consider how invested the reader is at any given moment.
In and Of Itself is fascinating in the respect that we are all this orator. We are all one person on a stage trying to keep an audience invested. We desperately need them to care. To want us to keep going. As such, it’s our job to use every trick in the book – everything we know about writing – to keep their interest. It doesn’t matter if it’s sophisticated or the cheapest trick in the book. If it works, it should be in the toolbox.
And our orator has many tricks up his sleeve. For example, he establishes these window displays behind him. Each of them has a different object in it that, until called upon, is a mystery to us. But starting with the Rouleteesta story and connecting that to the Rouleteesta puppet display, he now has us wondering, “Hmm, I wonder what those other displays mean.” And what’s the only way for us to find out? It’s to keep listening to the story.
You can do the same thing in screenwriting. In Star Wars, when we see the Death Star blow up Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet, and Mof Tarkin demands that Leia tell him where the Rebel Base is, that is a ‘window display’ screenwriting trick. You are saying to the reader, “This planet-destroying death star is going to try and blow up the Rebel Base.” You’re giving us a peek into the future, just like those displays give us a peek into the future. And, also, just like those displays, there’s still mystery attached. We don’t know if they’re going to succeed or fail.
Just for a second, imagine Star Wars without the Death Star demonstration scene. If we never see it blow up a planet, we never see the window display that tells us what’s coming. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t think it was dangerous. But the window display trick gets us a lot more invested. And that’s the name of the game. The more invested the reader is, the more excited they are to turn the pages.
It turns out the orator is really good at giving you reasons to stick around, which is the secret sauce of any good story. You have to set up a situation by which people want to stick around. And so after the Rouleteesta story, the orator explains that one person from the audience, every show, must agree to come to the next night’s show. They will be in charge of the show’s “book,” which is sort of like a diary of every night’s performance. Unfortunately, that audience member is not allowed to see the end of the show. They will be required to leave, with the book, come back the next night, and only then will they get to see the ending.
The orator leans into this fact and explains to the book-taker that he’s going to LOVE the ending. There’s going to be an elephant. Like a real live elephant. Out here on this tiny stage. It’s what makes the show everything it is, he emphasizes, reiterating several times the craziness that’s going to happen at the end of the show. It’s life-changing.
Most people, when they hear this, don’t know what’s going on. They’re wrapped in the comedic back-and-forth between the orator and the audience member, who’s learning the rules of the book and what will be required of him going forward. But seasoned storytellers know exactly what’s happening. The orator is feeding our need to stick around – to be there when this big crazy thing happens. Everyone in that audience is now looking forward to the ending. Imagine having a reader that excited about the end of your story. You could probably write a 50 page dialogue scene in a diner before that ending and still have the reader excited to get to that final act.
In and Of Itself is one of those rare experiences for screenwriting fanatics like myself where we get to see the storytelling form from a different perspective and therefore notice things that we usually overlook. It’s a reminder that all we’re trying to do in a screenplay is tell a series of stories – through scenes, through sequences – that readers want to keep reading. And that there are numerous tricks you can use to get there. This movie was a great reminder of that.
