Lateral thinking is about taking other paths, offering new things, surprise.

by Lee Matthias

(Continued from Part 3)

If the story’s stylistics dictate that the opening plunge directly into the main narrative, then the approach would be to examine the story events that come first and find an access point that is not the obvious one.

This would be like entering the house through the back door, or better yet, the side window, or perhaps through a wall! THE BIG SLEEP has Phillip Marlowe going to General Sternwood’s estate where he will meet the old man and take the case. Lots of other private eye stories followed that lead.

HARPER chose to avoid what was now a clichéd opening, but only by starting at a slightly earlier moment in the same action: when Lou Harper gets out of bed. But writer Goldman makes it pay its way by (as I’ve described earlier) telling us what kind of guy Harper is as he makes himself yesterday’s coffee. This gives the opening that measure of interest.

Lateral thinking is about taking other paths, offering new things, surprise.

So, let’s try one more. Let’s say, in broad strokes, in our opening we have a cop who ends up killing the very guy he needs to question to solve the case he’s on and find justice for his partner’s death.

As it unfolds, we learn that he needs to talk to a drug dealer to learn the identity of the dealer’s supplier and take down the whole organization. In a radio conversation, we get a sense that this is the culmination of an investigation that has gone on for years and left the cop’s partner and the partner’s family murdered.

The cop’s last and only chance to close this case is right now. But when he approaches the dealer, he’s spotted and is forced to defend himself, killing the guy before he can arrest and question him. Ordinarily, this might be done by the cop knocking on the guy’s door and finding himself in a gun battle in which he lives and the other guy doesn’t.

We’ve seen this a thousand times in every cop show on tv from M-SQUAD to CSI. How might we, as lateral thinkers, enter this scenario on an alternate path to give it more interest, more surprise, more excitement?

We’ve seen this a thousand times in every cop show on tv
from M-SQUAD to CSI.

Instead, let’s try this: we open on a cop in his car watching people at leisure on the edge of Central Park. Kids play, lovers stroll, joggers with iPodsTM and earbuds run by. Over his radio, after some truncated version of the exposition I described above, he’s told that the subject they’re looking for is the only one who knows the identity of the ringleader they’re after, and to arrest him for interrogation.

He watches idly, sipping coffee on a fine, early autumn afternoon. Nothing seems to be happening. Then we see one of those horse-drawn carriages roll by and begin to drop off a couple with a small toddler.

The cop says that he sees his guy. We think it’s the man getting out of the carriage. But when the cop starts to get out of his car to go over, the subject spots him–it’s the carriage driver! He whips his horse into action and races away. But the couple hadn’t gotten the child out yet, and now he’s stuck in the recklessly racing carriage.

The cop starts his car and gives chase, following the horse and carriage at break-neck speed through the city. The driver goes off-road and into the park to elude pursuit, but the cop stays with him, jumping over a curb,driving through the park, and even down some steps.

We are shown that underneath the car, a brake line is torn away as the cop swerves to avoid a skate-boarder and sheers off a drinking fountain. The car immediately begins spraying a trickle of precious brake fluid, unbeknownst to the cop. Meanwhile, in the carriage seat, the toddler is having the time of his life, looking around and laughing uproariously. The carriage driver continues out of the park and through several back alleys, forcing the cop to squeeze his car between delivery trucks and pedestrians to maintain the chase. Suddenly, after several close calls and nearly dumping the laughing toddler out, the driver reins his horse to a stop, jumps off the carriage, and runs into a large indoor urban shopping mall.

The cop, following at speed hits his brakes, but the car fails to stop, and as he watches the carriage, horse, and child coming at him through his windshield, he whips the steering wheel to the right, and the car smashes through the mall’s glass entry doors and inside. Getting out of the smashed car in the midst of the wreckage, the cop discovers that he’s just killed his quarry by running him down.

So he must now spend the rest of the film trying to identify the ringleader and resolve the case. So, why did I have another car crashing into a building? I dunno. It’s been that kind of a day, I guess. Be glad it wasn’t trains.

Where does the carriage driver job come from? We look at our situation: a criminal who eventually dies when our hero tries to capture him. We consider the criminal. Who is he? What’s his life like? What’s he do with his time? By asking these questions, we begin to speculate on all the possibilities.

What would a criminal do when he’s not doing crime? Maybe he’d have a job. What job might he have that would be interesting? We list jobs: cab driver, house painter, construction worker, doorman, grocery clerk, etc., etc.

What offers an opportunity for suspense? What might add to a pursuit and capture situation? Cab driver? Too common. But, what about the driver part? What other things might he drive? We list things he might drive: bus, motorcycle, skateboard, SequéTM, bicycle, subway, golf cart, truck, horse, carriage—whoa, stop! Carriage! What about a chase through Manhattan with a cop in a car pursuing a carriage from Central Park? Haven’t seen that before! And so it goes…

By considering our situation and the people in it, by asking questions and throwing out answers, we build a unique and visually interesting opening for our story. There is no great magic, here. We just take the time to look for alternatives and find the ones that can work for us. As I’ve said, we’ve had it in us all along.

-Lee Matthias
(from his book “Lateral Screenwriting”,
Publishing, June, 2012) 

I am a writer with three published novels, others on the way, a nonfiction book in the works, several screenplays written and in development.

During and after college, I worked as a theater projectionist and manager, in public relations, and as a literary agent selling to publishers and producers. Two heads are better than one, so I keep a human skull on my desk for inspiration (and a second opinion).

I currently work as a computer network administrator in government. I’m married and the father of two daughters. “I’m a computer professional: I don’t lie, I manage information.”

Photo Credit: Brandon Warren – mendhak – Stephan Geyer

by Lee Matthias

(Continued from Part 2)

While its main benefit is in writing the second act, any time one can work with bite-sized chunks of a narrative, it is a good thing. In Chapter 13 we identified certain characteristics and goals associated with specific sequences manifesting in the form of keywords and phrases that can be used to build our individual sequences.

The first act sequences have the following keywords associated with them:

The First Act Sequences

Sequence A Keywords –setting up; people; setting; arena or milieu; hero in his normal world; problem of the story; defining image; establishes tone or mood; dramatic tension

Sequence B Keywords – setting up; playing field; primary dramatic tension; deepen the tone or mood; hero set on a path; taking on the job of resolving; tension escalates

So these are our watchwords in writing our opening. We can employ them in our thinking and planning as we begin the process of entering our stories. By applying them to scene sequences that each run a maximum of about 15 pages, we can get control of our stories and make immediate progress. Failure to Launch But what if you can’t open your story? What if you can’t find a way to get in? What if you can’t write word one? Screenwriter, Ruth Gordon (with husband, Garson Kanin, co-wrote PAT AND MIKE, and ADAM’S RIB) once asked author W. Somerset Maugham:

“What if you sit down one morning at your desk and you can’t think of anything to write?” He replied,“Well, my dear, in that case, I sit down and write,- ‘W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W.Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham’… until something occurs to me, and it always does.” – Garson Kanin, interviewed by Pat McGilligan, Backstory 2, p. 104.

So you can try that. But if you do, remember, Maugham is spelled with a g-h. But, seriously, in the same book, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green suggested: “Sometimes at the very beginning of a project, if we can’t get going, we don’t begin at the beginning. That’s one little technique. We pick a scene somewhere along the line where we hope we already know the characters, and just write some dialogue. That often gets us moving.” – Backstory 2, p.86.

I did that very thing with my first novel. I had what I felt was a great story, but every attempt to enter it failed.

They all just seemed to me to be too pedestrian, too pat. Without really thinking about it, I decided to just start writing from a point where I knew well what had to happen. As it turned out, this was about 40 pages in from the eventual beginning of the book.

I wrote the entire novel from there, and by the end, I knew my characters so well that I was finally able to go back and make what had been a dull opening interesting. It was through my people! Hollywood makes movies out of sequence all the time. There’s no reason that the writer can’t write the script that way, too.

Let’s say you need a guy to find something out that starts the plot rolling. Let’s say he later will get arrested by police, but not before he causes something else to happen.

So,the guy’s in a room, talking on the phone, and he starts to hear some of the information. Let’s say it takes a while to get it all across. So, you intercut that with an old lady who is filling up her car at a gas station somewhere. She struggles through it as the guy listens and talks in that room.

Finally she’s done, and as she hangs up the pump nozzle and goes for her keys, she drops them. The guy talking on the phone is told something important to the story and writes it down. Then, as she tries to pick up her keys, her glasses fall off and she promptly steps on them, smashing them utterly.

Now, she finds her keys, but she can’t see. The guy now has the key piece of information, and he is trying to puzzle it out as he continues talking. The lady starts her car and drives out of the gas station, across six lanes of heavy traffic, and straight into the wall of a building. It happens to be our guy’s building. And the car and his desk are now having intimate relations.

So the guy jumps up, throws down the phone, and rather than help the old lady who is sitting behind the wheel looking around, trying to figure out what happened, he runs away. She doesn’t see this,but, instead gets out of the car and stumbles toward the desk where the phone receiver is, still off-the-hook. Her hearing is still fine, so she hears something from the phone, and as her hand grabs for the desk to stay on her feet, she picks it up, puts it slowly to her ear, and says, “Call the police!”

The caller hangs up, but the phone has a record in its memory of the last call, and later, when the police are sorting it all out, this will play a crucial role in our story.

Voila! Your dull, static, opening which you otherwise would never have used gets an injection of visual interest that plays directly into the plot. The insertion of the unexpected event out of left field was, of course, a case of lateral thinking in action.

-Lee Matthias
(from his book “Lateral Screenwriting”,
Publishing, June, 2012) 

I am a writer with three published novels, others on the way, a nonfiction book in the works, several screenplays written and in development.

During and after college, I worked as a theater projectionist and manager, in public relations, and as a literary agent selling to publishers and producers. Two heads are better than one, so I keep a human skull on my desk for inspiration (and a second opinion).

I currently work as a computer network administrator in government. I’m married and the father of two daughters. “I’m a computer professional: I don’t lie, I manage information.”

Photo Credit: Marwa Morgan – Sergio Lora

-by Lee Matthias

(Continued from Part 1)

He’s confronted with a diabolical series of obstacles to getting to the treasure, each of which he expertly and bravely overcomes, one after another. Once he’s gained the treasure, he’s betrayed by his guide, and left trapped.

All appears lost. With almost superhuman effort, he overcomes his predicament only to then face being crushed by an ancient booby trap. He barely avoids death again.

But then, emerging from the cave, he is met by an army of fierce natives, and has the treasure stolen from him by the villain of the larger story.He tries to escape,against overwhelming odds, and when he manages it and is safe on his seaplane, he finds himself belittled by his pilot for being afraid of the guy’s pet snake slithering around his feet.

We get his universe of danger, his expertise, his daring and resourcefulness, his sheer luck, and his weakness, all in the space of ten or so pages. And for good measure, we meet the villain of the larger story. That’s an opening!

But openings don’t have to be mini-movies. They can focus on setting up the hero, the setting, or the background of the story, too. The only requirement is that they succeed in pulling the audience in, hooking them with appeal, surprise, and strong entertainment value such as action, drama, tragedy, humor, or excitement.

Elsewhere, we’ve already mentioned the opening of HARPER where detective Lou Harper, played by Paul Newman, is shown getting up after a rough night.

His reluctant decision to re-use some other day’s coffee grounds and filter tell us much about him: how poorly he must feel to need coffee that badly, how sloppily he must live to still have it in the trash, how dedicated to his job he must be to force himself forward rather than just go back to bed and sleep it off.

 Openings don’t have to be mini-movies. They can focus on setting up the hero, the setting, or the background of the story, too.

I like to start by opening on a compelling image or action that embodies or comments on the story in some way. I am referring here to the very first shot or two. This has the effect of influencing the audience subtly, through tone or emotion. An example is the opening shots of ROBIN AND MARIAN: we see a still-life image of two ripe apples on a table, sumptuous and appealing, strongly reminiscent of classical renaissance paintings; then the fruit transforms, becoming brown and spoiled.

The imagery refers to the film’s story of an older Robin and Marian, long past the flower of youth. It sets up the larger story visually. Imagery can then begin the process of creating a film’s image system.

This is a way to influence the look and feel of the film on the visual level, thereby reinforcing or counterpointing the story level. Sound can be utilized in the same way, either corresponding to the image or counterpointing and commenting on the image.

A great example of the latter is in Francis Coppola’s film, THE CONVERSATION. The sound seems to bear no resemblance to the imagery, but as the opening progresses, it becomes clear what we are hearing and how it relates to what we are seeing.

The essential thing about beginnings is that they be about the business of the story and nothing less. This can mean starting the story itself, or setting up the story to be started after. And the story itself usually dictates which.

But, as with all screenwriting, there must be no space wasted on extraneous, irrelevant, or indirectly relevant material. One can’t establish just the setting of the tale if the tale is not directly about the setting itself.

Films that do this, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW have eventually related that opening setting to the story. It mustn’t be about some people and events that just happen to be in that setting, and as easily might’ve been in another.

So, Jimmy Stewart isn’t just another resident in the apartment complex, he’s a guy watching all those residents we’ve been seeing day and night because he’s laid up with a broken leg and can’t see anything else. He’s a guy who sees things, out his rear window.

Photo Credit:  Will Hart – monkeyc.net – Lali Masriera – Fr. Dougal McGuire