The art of dialogue.
Whereas every other component of screenwriting can be taught, dialogue remains a shapeless colorless mist, something we keep trying to grab onto, yet continually come up empty.
How elusive is dialogue? Do a Google search right now. Try to find one article about dialogue that has a tip in it that you haven’t heard 17 million times already.
These people who claim to be dialogue experts can only recite the same tips Syd Field spouted 30 years ago in his best-selling screenwriting book. Come into a scene late. Leave early. Use as little exposition as possible. Blah blah blah. Oh, and here’s my favorite one: Listen to how people talk.
Oh yeah, yeah. I’ll listen to how people talk. Because people talking for 45 minutes is exactly the same as needing to write a two minute conversation in a movie.
Probably the most confusing story about dialogue that I’ve ever come across is the Thor: Ragnarok line. After professional screenwriters making millions of dollars for their months and months of work put Thor: Ragnarok together, they’re shooting the scene where Thor is about to fight someone in a gladiator arena, and out comes the Hulk. Hemsworth says the lines in the script. He then tries a few improv lines. Then there’s a Make-A-Wish kid on set that day. And he says to Chris Hemsworth, “Why don’t you try, ‘I know him. He’s a friend from work.’” Hemsworth does the line, and it not only ends up in the first trailer for the movie, but it becomes the centerpiece of the trailer and its most memorable line.
I want you to think about that for a second. A young kid, somewhere between 8-11 I’m guessing, was able to come up with the most popular line in a movie written and rewritten and developed and re-developed by Hollywood professionals, people supposedly at the very top of their profession.
Messes with your head, right?
Well, here’s what I’ve determined. While there is a randomness to dialogue that contributes to its elusiveness, there is a way to get better at it. There are five areas that influence your dialogue. And that four of them are under your control. The fifth, unfortunately, is not. But, if you can master the other four, you can write good dialogue. So what are these five things?
Know the Basics – Yes, I just made fun of this above. But you do need to learn dialogue basics in order to not make beginner mistakes. Yes, you need to come into scenes late. Yes, you need to leave scenes early. This will ensure that your characters only say what they need to say to move the story forward. Yes, you need to know what on-the-nose dialogue is. You need to understand what exposition is and how to keep it short and sweet. There’s quite a few basic lessons to learn. But a simple google search should have you covered, since they’re the only dialogue rules anyone on the internet knows.
Scene prep and conflict – I talked about this in my first and second dialogue articles in this series. You need to learn how to prep scenes that allow good dialogue to flourish. Understanding how to create a character goal in a scene, how to have the other character be in the way of that goal. Which leads us to conflict. You have to understand how conflict (and tension) works, the many different variations of it, because it is the driving force of most good dialogue. If there isn’t some imbalance in what the two characters want in a scene, their dialogue will be agreeable and mostly boring.
Tricks – Dialogue tricks come from experience. They’re little things you learn along the way that you can pull out whenever you need them to write good dialogue. An example of a trick is instead of having your hero talk about himself, have the other character in the scene do it. It’s almost always more natural. Watch the scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith interrogates Neo. It’s Agent Smith reading off Neo’s life. Neo doesn’t tell him anything. Creating characters that contrast is another. The more your two main characters contrast, the more biting their interactions will be, which will lead to better dialogue. There are tons of tricks to learn. The more you know, the less dialogue situations you’ll encounter that you don’t have answers for. Feel free to leave your dialogue tricks in the comments section.
Characters – Probably the single most important component outside of talent for writing good dialogue is character creation. You need at least some characters in your script who have personality, who like to talk, who have opinions, who are interesting in some capacity. If you insert boring characters who are passive or don’t like to talk or aren’t interesting or don’t have anything to say, the chances of you writing good dialogue are next to zero. Here’s an exercise. Write one scene with The Driver (Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive) and write another with Jack Sparrow. You tell me which scene was easier to write dialogue for. Or it doesn’t have to be as exaggerated as Jack Sparrow. It could be Louis Bloom from Nightcrawler. Or Alonzo from Training Day. Or Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network. When you create an interesting character who likes to talk, he/she will do most of the work for you. If you don’t, you’re going to be pulling your hair out trying to come up with interesting things to say for that character.
Pure Talent – Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you will never be these people. They possess a unique talent that allows them to think of things and say things in a certain way that makes their dialogue leap off the page. It’s incredibly frustrating to read a script from one of these people because you know you’ll never be that good. However, there ARE some things you can to do to momentarily upload yourself into the Dialogue Matrix, the place where these kings and queens exist. And if you can get here for even 15 seconds every once in awhile, that may be enough to come up with an amazing line, or a great exchange. To start, you need to realize that dialogue is the most artistic part of screenwriting. Therefore, you must turn off your conscious mind and access your unconscious mind. That means no thinking. That means no judgement. And it means a lot of free-writing. These geniuses write their dialogue mostly on instinct so if you’re not doing the same, you don’t have a shot. Go nuts. Have your characters say whatever comes to mind. You’re more likely to come up with a killer line this way than trying to logic-it into existence. The other thing I get from these writers is that there’s more of a sense of discovery in them. They enjoy trying to find the moment and the characters through their dialogue. Likewise, there’s a playfulness when they write dialogue. Like a kid playing with toys. They’re having fun and seeing what happens. In addition to this, they have a thirst for knowledge and history. They want to know more about the world and how it works. This allows their characters to be smarter and have more ideas to draw from. And they work from a place of, “I’ll edit it down later.” They don’t try to nail it in one go. Sometimes they will. But mostly they’ll write what comes to mind and cut it down to fit in the story later. And this is what allows them to have so many great dialogue moments. With all that exploration, they have more meat to work with.
Dialogue is difficult. But this idea that you’re either good at it or not is false. If you can master the first four areas – ESPECIALLY THE FOURTH – you can definitely get good at writing dialogue. From there, keep working on five. Do what you can. You’ll never surpass the masters. But if you can get to their level every once in awhile? That’s enough.
Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Hit List) Set against the austere backdrop of pig-hunting in modern day Hawaii, an unlikely bond is formed when an orphaned wild piglet takes shelter in the back yard of a grieving couple, leading to a series of emotional journeys and consequences for man and pig alike
About: This script finished on last year’s Hit List with 29 votes. It comes from Ariel Heller, who graduated from USC. He directed James Franco in an experimental film called The Mad Whale, which for some reason isn’t listed on Rotten Tomatoes. But it appears to have been directed by 10 other people as well. No, don’t ask me what’s going on. I just work here.
Writer: Ariel Heller
Details: 112 pages
It’s funny how Hollywood works. One second your live action animation pig screenplay is just another bottom-of-the-hit-list nothing script. Then a live action animal movie that breaks a bunch of records comes out, and all of a sudden your live action animation pig movie is looking pretty darn tasty.
Recently injured Hawaiian pig, Red Salvador, talks to us in voice over as he bleeds to death. He lays down in the middle of the highway and waits to be hit by a car so he can die. Cut to black. Six years earlier. We meet Joshua, a priest of sorts who’s just planted a Caro Leaf in honor of someone who died. 40 year old Kulani and her husband, Hal, observe the ceremony in tears.
We jump two weeks earlier. It’s here where the pregnant Kulani is told by a doctor that the baby in her is not alive. Hence, we now know what that ceremony was for. Cut to DAYS LATER when the stillborn baby is born. It’s also during this time that we meet Red, the baby piglet version, as he watches his herd of pigs get slaughtered by hunters! Red then walks over to Kulani’s garden, who’s happy to have someone to talk to.
Cut to one year later! Kulani is still struggling to connect with her husband, who was able to move past the stillborn baby easily. Her husband’s sister, Sylvie, is married to one of the big hunters in the area, Brian. Brian and his hunting dogs are mad that the local pig population is getting out of control. Red now has a new gang he rolls with. They go out, eat off all the farms, then come back to Kulani’s backyard, where they know they’ll be safe.
You get the idea. Tensions begin growing. Brian doesn’t like that the piglets have shelter and he can’t kill them. Sooner or later, he’s going to find a way to take them out, which is probably going to have us cutting to that opening scene again, to find out Red’s fate.
One of the first screenwriting lessons I ever learned came from Blake Snyder’s book, Save The Cat. In it, he said that there’s zero reason to write a script until you’ve got your logline down. I remember reading that and getting very angry for some reason. In retrospect, it was probably because I’d written a number of screenplays and I hadn’t worked out the logline beforehand on any of them. Usually, that’s why we dismiss new ideas. Because we want to protect the way we’ve been doing it ourselves.
But the more I thought about it, the more I understood the logic behind the tip. Snyder’s logic was that you need a single defining line that tells you what your movie is about so if you ever get lost or stumble into the weeds during your screenplay, you can always look at that logline to know what you’re supposed to do. So, in Avengers: Infinity War, your logline might look something like… “A group of the most powerful superheroes in the universe must stop a galactic villain from obtaining all five stones in the Infinity Gauntlet, which, when obtained, will allow him to erase half the universe.”
Now let’s look at the logline listed on the Hit List for Red Salvador: “Set against the austere backdrop of pig-hunting in modern day Hawaii, an unlikely bond is formed when an orphaned wild piglet takes shelter in the back yard of a grieving couple, leading to a series of emotional journeys and consequences for man and pig alike.”
Notice the difference between the two loglines. In the first, there is a clear goal, a clear conflict, and clear stakes. A bunch of superheroes trying to stop a bad guy from killing half the people in the universe. Now look at Red Salvador. There are some specifics to latch onto. An orphaned piglet. A grieving couple. Pig-hunting. I can sort of imagine a movie in there. But note the last part of the logline, “…leading to a series of emotional journeys and consequences for man and pig alike.”
You know what that line says so me? It says, “I don’t know where this story is going. Stuff is going to happen. Emotions will be involved. Eventually there will be an ending.”
I want to be fair. This very well may not have been the writer’s logline. Sometimes the managers or agents write these up. But I bring it up because as I’m reading the script, I’m thinking, where is this going? It doesn’t seem to have a point. We’re with the nice family for a while, we’re with the hunters for awhile, we’re with the pigs for awhile. Five years ago. Two weeks ago. A week passes. A year passes. Five years pass. This script reads like the writer is making it up as he goes along.
It is therefore a prime candidate for Blake Snyder’s logline rule. Had the writer written out a logline ahead of time, they would be forced to come up with a clearer narrative and, probably, would’ve had a more focused screenplay.
Now do I think the Blake Snyder logline lesson is essential every time out? No, of course not. If you’re a seasoned writer who understands goals, stakes, urgency, clarity, and how to properly structure a story, you very well might be able to pull this off instinctually. But if you’re still in the “Under-6 Screenplays” category, it may be something you want to try.
Because, frankly, this screenplay is all the f&*% over the place. Between the random time jumps and sketchy world-building and wandering narrative, it was nearly impossible to stay focused on what was happening. Which is frustrating because the story has some nice elements. Kulani dealing with her stillborn child at 40 years old has the seeds for an interesting character study. The mythology of Hawaii and pig-hunting in the region and how it affects farming – that had some potential.
But here’s where the writer made their mistake. And it’s the same thing I see with thousands of writers. They tried to do too much. They’re covering too many sides. There’s no true main character, no true narrative guiding our story. And that’s fine if you’re Quentin freaking Tarantino and you can handle it. But if you’re Joe This is My Fourth Screenplay, you can’t. Trust me, you can’t. You gotta live in reality and come up with a narrative you can handle.
A woman has a stillbirth. It effectively destroys her marriage. She’s broken, trying to find meaning in her life. She befriends a stray pig who likes coming to her garden. And that pig is in danger of being killed as the pig-hunting in the area becomes more aggressive. That’s all you need. Don’t complicate it! I swear, I’m going to put that sentence on my grave. Those three words could’ve saved millions of screenplays.
I’m not going to say this script is a lost cause. But it would need at least half a dozen rewrites before it was in shape. Some writers need a producer to help them find their story. I think that’s the case here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The main thing that writing out a logline ahead of time does, is it helps you understand what your main character is trying to accomplish, and what stands in his way of doing it. Those are two of the most important parts of the story and they happen to be the two crucial components to writing a good logline.
Genre: Superhero/1 Hour TV Drama
Premise: (from Wikipedia) In a world in which super-powered “heroes” have become commonplace, they are syndicated, monetized, and marketed by a company called Vought International. Unfortunately, money and privilege corrupt, and many of the “supes” give in to their darker impulses. A clandestine group of normal-human vigilantes then arises to counter the corrupt “supes.”
About: Eric Kripke, coming over from Supernatural, has teamed up with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Amazon, to bring this best-selling comic book to the HD screen. Amazon is fast moving away from artsy-fartsy shows (they cancelled Forever, The Romanoffs, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young) to focus on big-budget fare. They love their Jack Ryan series, are putting together that Lord of the Rings show, and The Boys doesn’t look cheap either.
Writer: Erik Kripke (who’s working alongside Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) (based on the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson)
Details: 1 hour show, 8 episodes, on Amazon Prime
The Boys is a reminder of just how difficult it is to write a good TV show.
A couple of years ago, I said to everyone, “Don’t write traditional super hero stuff. Come up with ideas that involve superheroes in non-traditional ways.” Since then, the industry has moved squarely in that direction, trying to leach off of the superhero box office boom any way it can. We saw a couple of pilots about cleaning up after mass superhero destruction (neither succeeded). We got that spec script about a group of criminals who pull a heist on a superhero’s lair. There’s Legion, which I’m pretty sure is a superhero-adjacent show. And Agents of SHIELD, which has managed to stay on the air somehow.
Well now Amazon has introduced The Boys, about a group of superheroes who SEEM like the smoothest greatest coolest things since sliced bread. However behind closed doors, they’re a bunch of toxic, evil, manipulative, deceitful scumbags.
The story follows two main characters. There’s Annie, aka “Starlight,” a superhero who’s just made it to the big time. She’s joining “The Seven,” the biggest superhero group in the world. However Annie’s world is rocked when her childhood crush, Aquaman-like superhero The Deep, forces her to perform a sexual act on him.
And then there’s Hughie, who’s deeply in love with his girlfriend, and who, after getting out of work one day, is staring her in the eyes, only for her to turn into a big blob of goo. 200 feet down the street, he sees Flash-like superhero, A-Train, come to a stop, covered in the blood of his beau. Oops, he accidentally ran into her while running 10,000 miles an hour. Hughie watches in shock as A-Train shrugs and runs off.
Annie must quickly decide if this group of people she’s aspired to join her entire life is worth its ugly underbelly. It doesn’t help that her mom has groomed her for this and would hate her if she gave up. Meanwhile, Hughie tries to find justice for his murdered girlfriend but unfortunately the government and the superheroes are in lock-step. They tell him superhero collateral damage is an unfortunate part of keeping the city safe. Oh, but here’s $45,000 for your trouble.
Not long after that, Hughie gets a visit from a rough-and-tumble FBI agent named Billy Butcher. Billy says he sympathizes with Hughie’s situation and maybe they can help each other. He wants Hughie to use his girlfriend’s recent death to get into Vought International (the superheroes’ skyscraper), then plant a bug underneath their conference table. Unfortunately, Translucent (who has the power of invisibility) sees Hughie do this, and follows him and Billy back to Hughie’s work, where he attacks them. Will he succeed? Get Amazon Prime to find out!
The Boys is a frustrating show. At times during the pilot, you see the potential there. Other times, they make baffling choices. A-Train crashing into and killing the girl was a great inciting incident. What superhero fan hasn’t thought about that? That someone with super speed might occasionally bump into someone. And when you bump into someone at 10,000 miles an hour, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
The mythology is clever as well. In this universe, superheroes are like NBA athletes. They get shoe deals, cereal deals, their faces plastered all over billboards. Not only that, but Vought International is a privatized business. When your city’s crime rate goes up, Vought calls you and says, “We’ll offer you Superhero #11 for three years for 300 million dollars.” All that was great.
But then there’s the sleazy superhero sexual stuff, which felt a little tone deaf in today’s Hollywood. In the second episode, Starlight has to go on a mission with The Deep, and I thought, so we’re just going to follow these two as a team even though he sexually assaulted her? I get that we’re approaching these superheroes through a realistic eye, but you can still be judicious about how slimy you get.
Then there was the sloppiness of the plotting.
Here’s how I look at plotting. There’s three tiers. There’s the Bottom Tier. This is where you can feel the writer actually coming up with ideas as he’s writing. Typically you only see this in amateur writing and really bad straight-to-digital movies. But it can also pop up in sequels where they were rushing and didn’t care about the quality of the film so much as meeting a release date. Pretty much the entire last Indiana Jones movie would fall into this category.
On the flip side of this, you have the Invisible Tier. This is when the plotting is so invisible, you aren’t aware of it. The scenes don’t feel like a writer stuffing all the information they need into the scene to move the story forward. Rather, it just feels like you’re watching people’s lives. Characters never sound like they’re setting up important plot points or dishing out exposition. Eighth Grade was a good example of this. Nobody’s going to watch that movie and think, “The plotting was so obvious!”
The majority of plotting, however, exists in between these two extremes, in the Middle Tier. This is when writers are good enough to hide the majority of their plot points. But there’s an inherent lack of effort to want to get it right. And these writers are stuck in the middle for that reason. Because they’re not willing to do the extra work to make the plot in their movies or their TV shows completely invisible.
So what am I talking about?
Well, there’s this sequence in the pilot of The Boys that’s low Middle Tier plotting. In fact, it’s borderline Bottom Tier. Billy Butcher comes to Hughie with a plan to bug the superhero conference room. He tells Hughie, who previously rejected the 45,000 dollar compensation from Vought International for killing his girlfriend, to go back and say he’s willing to accept it. Then, while he’s there and they’re signing the check, slip the bug under their conference table.
Okay, let’s think through this here. Vought International’s building is 70 stories tall. The Seven’s Conference room, where they talk about superhero stuff, is on the top floor. In what reality would the business division of Vought International bring a random guy up to the most exclusive room in the world to sign a check? Wouldn’t they have some other room to do this in considering there are hundreds of rooms in the building?
So why then, do the writers have it happen in the most important room? Because if it didn’t, then there could be no scene where Hughie places the bug under their conference table. That’s the plot point that’s driving this whole sequence. So the writers figured, even though it makes ZERO SENSE that they would do this check transaction in this room, we’re going to do it anyway because we’re too lazy to think of a better way to do it.
That, my friends, is Low Mid Tier Plotting. It’s just not good enough.
And here’s why that’s a problem. Because if that’s going to happen in THE PILOT – the script you have the most time to write – then how sloppy are things going to get in episodes 2-8? When you don’t have any time to write? Sure enough, we get to episode 2, and there’s this really boring A-plot where Hughie hangs out with Translucent, who’s in a cage, for the whole show. And that’s when I turned this off.
I think everybody is living in some fantasy world where because there are so many TV jobs, they don’t think they have to bring it. They can just coast. But the other side of that argument is that people have more options to watch than ever. And if your show drops the ball for even half-an-episode, they’ll never come back. Which is why there are 1000 shows on TV yet people have only heard about five of them. So if you want to be one of the invisible shows that people hear about when it first premieres because of the promotional campaign and then never hear from again, go ahead and be as lazy as you want. But if you want something that’s going to make an impact, lazy plotting will be your downfall.
It’s too bad because the mythology to this show is really cool. And that’s what I responded to. I’m guessing that’s why the comic book is so beloved. But the show itself is messy. And that’s inexcusable.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the best movies ever to watch when it comes to hiding plot is Back to the Future. Specifically, watch the scene where Doc first explains to Marty how the time machine works. The scene conveys around 20 important points for later in the movie. And yet you don’t notice one. That’s because the scene is framed as Doc needing to document the time machine for science (which is why Marty is recording with a camera) combined with his utter excitement about his creation. It’s truly genius stuff.
In this newsletter, I go over my thoughts on Marvel’s experimental Phase 4, give some candid opinions on this month’s trailers, with a special shout out to Knives Out. I sneak into the muddy waters of that new Matt Damon Ben Affleck project. I come up with an epiphany regarding that new “Wishing Tree” project sale. And, oh yeah, I just happen to review ANOTHER SCRIPTSHADOW TOP 25 SCRIPT! You wanna know how you know you’re reading a good script? When you’re not thinking about what you’re going to do next. When all you can think about is the next page. And that was me with this script.
So, check your Inboxes, guys and gals! If you don’t receive the newsletter within the next hour, make sure to check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders in your e-mail program. If you can’t find it there, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER!” and I’ll send it to you. Enjoy!
p.s. For those of you e-mailing me saying that you keep signing up but don’t receive the newsletter, try sending me another e-mail address. E-mailing programs are notoriously quirky and there may be several invisible reasons your e-mail address/server is rejecting the e-mail.
Genre: Drama
Premise: A fading moving star and his trusty stuntman navigate the perils of Hollywood in 1969.
About: Psychologically, it was imperative that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood cross the 40 million dollar mark this weekend. So thank goodness it was BARREELLLLY able to do so, grabbing 40.2 million dollars. The film has been working up a big lather of discussion and I hope to add to that today.
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Details: 2 hours and 45 minutes
[MAJOR SPOIIIIILLLLLLERRRSSS]
Quentin.
Vs.
Marvel!
Don’t ignore the reality. This is what this really is. This is original auteurs versus the giant moviemaking machines. I remember people complaining when Star Wars and Jaws came out. “Oh no! Now it’s going to be all about the blockbuster!” And, yes, it eventually became about the blockbuster. But that’s nothing compared to today. Today it’s about the superstar IP franchise-starting make-stockholders-happy mega movie. And nobody embodies that better than Marvel.
Which means that whether you like Quentin Tarantino or not, you should support him. Because the fewer of him there are around, the closer we are to an all-Marvel Hollywood. And don’t get me wrong. I like most Marvel movies. I’d just like to have the occasional choice, you know.
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is set in 1969 and Rick Dalton, the star of a popular Western TV show called “Bounty Law,” has since tried his luck at becoming a movie star. However, it’s not going well. With each passing part, he’s getting cast more and more as the bad guy, which means he’s just there to get killed. This has driven Rick to lots of drinking.
Rick’s best friend is his stunt double, Cliff Booth. Cliff stopped getting work when rumors began swirling that he murdered his wife. Therefore, the only time Cliff gets to be a stunt double is when Rick demands that they hire him. Meanwhile, Cliff drives Rick around and takes care of his house.
Sharon Tate, who was infamously murdered by the Manson family, is an aspiring actress here who just happens to have moved into the house next to Rick’s with her husband, Roman Polanski. Rick often ponders the randomness of the world and how if he could just bump into them, he would go from Rick Dalton, TV extra, to Rick Dalton, starring in a Roman Polanski movie. But alas, that will never happen. Will it?
If there’s a plot to be had here, it would be Rick’s journey to do good work. He’s trying, despite all odds, to become a movie star. So we follow him to movie sets and watch him try, with all his might, to give the best performances possible, in the hopes that somebody important will notice that he can still be the next Steve McQueen.
Wow.
I mean, is there a writer who’s more confusing to new screenwriters than Quentin Tarantino? On the one hand, you can use his scripts to convey some of the most useful tips in screenwriting. On the other, he does tons of things you should never allow a screenwriter to do. And I think this script highlights that better than most.
Take Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Pitt). What’s one of the first things they teach you in screenwriting class? That the main two characters who are teamed up in your story should have conflict with one another. That doesn’t mean Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker over-the-top conflict. It could mean Miles and Jack conflict from the movie, Sideways, where they don’t see the world the same way and are always banging up against each other about what to do.
Rick and Cliff have zero conflict with one another. They’re like two peas in a pod, the best of pals. And it stays that way THE WHOLE MOVIE. Now, ultimately, the only question that matters is, does it work? If we enjoy watching these characters together, it shouldn’t matter that there’s no conflict. And I enjoyed watching these two. But there’s another question we have to consider, which is, if Tarantino HAD created conflict between them, would we have enjoyed the movie MORE? And I think the answer to that question is yes.
There’s a moment in the script that hints at the idea that Rick isn’t trying hard enough to get Cliff stunt work. That maybe he only sees him as a 24/7 caddy. If that thread would’ve been explored more, and had Cliff grown some resentment towards Rick, I think their relationship might’ve been more interesting to watch. Instead they’re the bromance to end all bromances.
The individual character journeys were also interesting from a screenwriting perspective. The most obvious conflict in the movie comes from Rick Dalton, who’s battling his falling star. And, once again, Tarantino stays away from conventional structuring. In a conventional movie, you would have an upcoming role that if Rick Dalton nailed, the studio was going to sign him to a new 5 picture deal. This gives the story a goal and stakes. Instead, we just sort of travel around with Rick as he goes to set and acts. We’re not all that sure what the stakes are other then, if he does a good job, he’ll feel like he’s still “got it.” When people complain about the rambling nature of this story, this is what they’re talking about. If your main character isn’t trying to accomplish anything, the narrative focus is going to suffer.
Then there’s Cliff. Cliff isn’t trying to accomplish anything. Nor does he have any sort of internal conflict. He appears to be dependent on Rick for work. And yet he doesn’t seem scared about what would happen if Rick stopped getting work. If a character’s journey doesn’t have any stakes attached to it, then that journey will feel pointless. What’s crazy is that Cliff’s character has the tools to be compelling. Everybody believes that he killed his wife. Maybe he even did kill his wife. So if he’s out there trying to gain everyone’s respect back, if he’s trying to become a stunt performer who doesn’t need Rick Dalton to get work, then at least he’s moving towards something. But in the Bruce Lee scene (he fights Bruce Lee, which gets him kicked off the set), he’s completely unconcerned with losing that job. He’s even smirking about it. So if he doesn’t care about losing his job, why would I worry about him? Or what happens to him?
Finally, there’s Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose character is another Tarantino Screenwriting Paradox. If you got rid of all of Sharon Tate’s scenes, nothing about the movie would change. And that’s another Screenwriting 101 lesson. If it’s not necessary for the story, get rid of it. BUT there’s a counter argument to this. Most people who go into this movie know Sharon Tate was brutally murdered in the Manson murders. Therefore, by keeping her in the movie, you’re building up an association between her and the audience, who knows her fate is coming. Therefore, when she lives instead of dies, all of that earlier time spent with her pays off. Cause we actually care that she lived. Had we not seen her at all, we wouldn’t have cared. Now could Tarantino have better connected her storyline to the plot? Probably. Could he have given her more to do than watch a movie in Westwood? I’m guessing yeah. So I do understand why people have a problem with her.
The truth is this script probably needed two more drafts. And I’m going to tell you how I know that. What is everyone’s biggest complaint about the film? It’s that there’s no plot. That we sort of drift around Hollywood without purpose. Now, what are the two sequences in the film everyone is talking about? They are when Cliff Booth goes to the Manson Farm and the ending scene where the Manson followers break into Rick’s house.
So what do those two things tell you? You need a plot and the thing that’s working best in your story is the Manson stuff. With a couple more drafts, Tarantino could’ve shaped this more around the Mansons. And here’s where screenwriting gets hard. I think Tarantino went into this script not wanting to center the story on the Mansons. To him, this was always about an actor and his stunt man. So even if the Manson stuff becomes the best thing in the script? He’s already created a bias by which he won’t center the story around it. All screenwriters do this. I’ve done it a dozen times myself. We write with a certain type of movie in mind, forgetting that the only rule in storytelling is to entertain. So if another, more exciting, story starts to present itself over the course of a screenplay, you have to follow that. Well, you don’t have to. But you probably should.
The ending of this script is its biggest talking point. Some people aren’t sure what to make of keeping Sharon Tate alive. What’s the message there? I actually think the ending is the most powerful moment in the film because here’s the thing about the Manson family. Everybody was obsessed with how nonsensical and random the murders were. And what I think Tarantino was trying to say was that they could’ve just as easily walked into a different house and the result would’ve been totally different. That a certain set of circumstances had to go right for them to be able to do what they did. Because these weren’t trained killers. They were clueless acid-tripping hippies. And had they walked into a house with a couple of big strong dudes, they might’ve gotten their a**es handed to them. Tarantino is showing just how random Hollywood and life is. That one little decision here or there changes EVERYTHING. In that ending, Rick Dalton does end up meeting Roman Polanski. And maybe he does become a movie star.
So where does this leave me on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Believe it or not, I loved it. Even with all my criticisms, Tarantino brings a knowledge and a love to filmmaking that you can’t quantify in sluglines and parentheticals. As much as the lack of plot hurt the script, it helped the movie. The less we thought about plot, the more realistic everything seemed. When characters aren’t saying things like, “We need to get the tesseract before Loki,” we’re less likely to remember that we’re watching a movie. And that’s what Tarantino does here. He brings us back to 1969 and presents a narrative that’s so easy-going, it doesn’t feel like a movie at all. It feels like we’re really there. And for me, it felt like like I was REALLY REALLY there, because I was. I watched this at the Arclight on Sunset, and 70% of Once Upon A Time was shot right in that area.
So it was just a very immersive experience. There are always screenwriting lesson to be learned from Tarantino. But I wouldn’t look too deep into what he’s doing here and say, “I’m going to do that, too.” This guy is operating on another level. But if there is a lesson to take away from this, I’d say that it’s, write about something you love more than anything. Cause it really comes through on the page when you do.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a line of dialogue in the last scene of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood that exemplifies why Tarantino is so far ahead of everyone else. Major spoiler by the way. In the scene, ambulances and police cars have just left after cleaning up the Manson attack. Sharon Tate’s friend, Jay, standing behind the gate, spots Rick and asks what happened. Rick introduces himself. “Hi, I’m Rick Dalton. I live next door.” I don’t remember the exact response, so I’ll paraphrase it. Jay says, “Are you kidding? I know. Sharon Tate always says to me that if we ever need to take someone out, Jake Cahill from Bounty Law lives right next to us.” The fact that Tarantino went so far as to create a conversation off-screen that a character would then reference later in order to create a bond between two characters who have never met each other shows just how extensively he digs into his characters. It’s very likely Tarantino wrote some “off-screen” scenes, which are scenes between characters that won’t make the movie, but you do it as a writer to get to know the characters better. Does Jay have that line ready without that off-screen scene written? Probably not. Writers these days don’t take the time anymore, which is why we have so many empty surface-level films. Which is why we’re lucky to still have people like Tarantino working in the business.
