Just Effing Entertain Me

Close Your Eyes

Recently I sat and talked with one of the ADR guys working with Terrence Malick on THE TREE OF LIFE, and as he explained what he does we wandered into a discussion of our favorite sounds. I played him a recording I have of a mullah’s call to prayer in Jaffa that I made a few months ago. Then a recording of the bells of St. Joseph’s church in Nazareth. Another one of two Arab cab drivers arguing about something. I collect sounds, you see. Enraptured by our conversation about sounds and how evocative they are, we both closed our eyes and listened to the sounds of the Lot bustling around us. But it wasn’t all bustling at all. There were birds, the wind shushing through the jacaranda trees, the click and buzz of walkie talkies, the beep of a truck backing up, a honk from the traffic on Santa Monica boulevard.

And as we talked, Kris and I, about our favorite sounds, he said that his favorite sound of all was the city of Venice, Italy. Because there are canals with boats, it is much quieter than most cities and he said you can walk down the sidewalk and hear dishes clinking, voices chatting and laughter floating - you can hear people living their lives, he said.  And you can hear people living their lives too.

Do it today. Bring a notepad, sit outside, close your eyes and listen to the world happening around you. Listen for a good five to ten minutes. Then open your eyes and write down all the sounds you heard. Now imagine you are writing down those descriptions for a romantic comedy you are writing. Would you describe them differently? What about a thriller? Does the distant sound of traffic sound foreboding or like a comforting, familiar sound?

What are your favorite sounds? What sounds are comforting to you? How about irritating? Do you incorporate sounds in your script? If you’re not, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to add a cinematic dimension to your story.

Words Into Pictures

Hello everybody! Had fun teaching to a full room at Warner Bros today! Our topic was Words Into Pictures: Writing Cinematically for the Silver Screen. It seems obvious that script writing should be colorful, sensory and cinematic but many writers, fearing that they don’t have license to write anything more elaborate than a blueprint, err on the side of writing dull, dry pages.

We talked today about the Three S’s: sight, sound, smell. So that if we have a scene set in a forest, we engage the reader’s senses wholly by using evocative words to describe the sharp smell of pine needles on the forest floor, or the way the sun looks peeking through the branches, or the muffled footsteps of a shadowy deer.

We also talked about establishing an intention, on page one, for how you want the reader to FEEL when reading the script and in particular, when reading each scene. Know your genre and set your agenda very early. If this is a thriller, we want to set up dread on evey page. So that forest might not be so sun-dappled, right? And perhaps the pine needles are rotting and black. And wind blows the branches.

So we manipulate the world we describe in action lines, slug lines and in dialogue to literally hypnotize the reader into feeling the way we intend them to. If Muzak is playing in a deserted convenience store late at night, if it’s totally generic elevator music, that’s creepy. But if it’s “Dancing Queen” or “The Hustle,” that’s a little funny. You can indicate music if there’s a source for it in the scene. A radio, boom box, CD player or radio. Otherwise, indicating music is NOT done.

We use modifiers and adjectives in the same way a painter uses paint in a pointillist painting. Little dots flecked with color take on a complete picture when you stand back.

Don’t worry about these details so much in your first draft – this is polish work. But do bear in mind, even in the early drafts, that your job is to seduce the reader into feeling the way you want them to feel about the story.

So set your intention on page one by knowing your genre and paying homage to it on every page. Bear in the mind the Three S’s (sight, sound, smell) and dig deep into your vocabulary for descriptors that turn the red apple into a blood red apple into a scarlet apple into a blushing apple into a crimson apple and back again.

That is all. Now get back to work.