Logan Giannini
December, 2009
Impact and Import
“Fairy tales are important not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
--G. K. Chesteron
A chicken. A samurai. John Lennon. Three esoteric non-sequeters, but they are tied together in a truly marvelous way in my mind, a way that has become indicative of why I tell stories.
We remember facts, my sophomore-year psychology professor told us, better when they are in context. A history date is nothing to us, but if we read about the events that took place on that date, as well as before and after, we will be far more likely to recall it. “Pick three things, any three things,” he told the class and, after a moment, he received the afore-mentioned “things”. “So,” professor Ohnesorge continued, “you’re walking to chapel and you have a chicken, when all of a sudden you’re attacked by a samurai. About to be overcome, John Lennon springs to your aid and beats the samurai. You continue on your way with the chicken.” A simple, ridiculous little anecdote created on the spot, but it’s now been well over two years since that day in class and, having forgotten much of textbook material, I still remember those three “things” and probably always will.
People can claim until they are blue in the face that fiction is precisely that, fictional and false, but learning to make movies is much more than that, and although I knew it from the start, it takes years to learn to articulate, exactly, how. Why is it any more than a pastime? And, if it’s so important, how do you approach it? With what reverence?
I began to write films long before I was troubled with these questions, and my first guide-book along the path to the perfect screenplay was Robert McKee’s Story. I came to this book years before college, in a screenwriting class I attended, and have read and re-read it multiple times since then. Early on, McKee promises that the book is “about principles, not rules.” Would that this were true.
Story provides a number of things. For the true novice, it paints a simple portrait of how to construct a screenplay, demonstrating formatting and taboos of the medium, and just starting out, this is all you want. However, once you’ve progressed a little further in your studies, you can truly appreciate the wealth of knowledge contained herein. Particularly arresting is his chapter on subtext, in which he states the following:
Two attractive people sit opposite each other at a candlelit table, the light glinting off the crystal wineglasses and the dewy eyes of the lovers. […] The lovers reach across the table, touch hands, and look longingly in each others’ eyes, say, “I love you, I love you”… and actually mean it. This is an un-actable scene and will die like a rat in the road.
This story is accompanied by the excellent axiom ‘When a scene is about what a scene is about, you’re in deep shit.’ Good advice. Very often true. But McKee, despite his earlier assurances, states this—like much of his book—as gospel. Nowhere, in his world, is there room for compromise. Nowhere does he step back and say, “This is all well and good, but if you know the rules you can also break them to great effect.” A little research into the man himself reveals a person so violently didactic that he’s been known to throw students out of his world-famous screenwriting seminars.
This, my first real foray into the world of cinema, provided a valuable and oft-used lesson to me: take everything with a healthy dose of skepticism. That isn’t to say that McKee is wrong. Not even the things that I, personally, take umbrage with are necessarily wrong. Different strokes, as the old saying goes, and that understanding is important as you study anything as potentially polarizing as art.
David Mamet is one of my favorite authors when it comes to the nature, practice, and business of the film industry. His duo of film books On Directing Film and Bambi Vs. Godzilla being complemented nicely by his book on acting (for theatre) True and False are wonderful entries into film. Being skeptical, however, is the only way to read a Mamet book or essay, for he is one of the most dogmatic writers in the field, a firebrand in every sense of the word.
“You always want to tell the story in cuts. Which is to say, through a juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected,” says Mamet early in his first chapter of On Directing Film. He writes succinctly, as just as McKee was a good place to start for novice screenwriters, Mamet provides a jumping-off place for aspiring directors who have only the vaguest understanding of the director’s role. Many books written on directing are vague, abstract pieces of philosophy (I’m thinking, specifically, of Sidney Lumet’s book) that provide little of practical use. I myself knew nothing of the film director’s job beyond his interaction with the actors, and Mamet provided a simple rubric for the job. Their tasks on the film set are, he states simply, “what to tell the actors and where to put the camera.” Mamet spells out simply and succinctly how the director should approach the script, tackling the oft-ignored job of shot-listing, which is, he says, their primary job.
Mamet also, in this book, condemns such conventions as the establishing shot and the use of Steady-Cam, a device used in film for long, unbroken shots that appear with relative smoothness. They are, he insists, antithetical to the true nature of filmmaking, whose tool is the cut, not the scene. I read this book while preparing my film (We Are the Sum) and, trusting relatively implicitly in Mamet, I struggled a great deal with these assertions. It was, at last, a combination of acting and short prose that moved me past my difficulties and allowed me to glean what worked for me from Mamet’s volumes and leave the rest.
In my introductory acting course we studied a number of acting methods, including Mamet’s own, stark approach to the art. We learner about Stanislavki’s “method.” We studied Uta Hagen, Brecht, Artaud, and others. It was a boggling initiation into a world far more complex than I had anticipated. Approach the play psychologically, says Stanislavski. Speak plainly, don’t embellish, says Mamet. Rely on your memory, says Lee Strasberg. In my own mind, I couldn’t make sense of all these systems, much less reconcile them to each other, nor should I. My problem was not in accepting each method’s validity, which I did unquestioningly, but rather in my accepting each method’s bearing on my own growth as an actor. Needless to say, I did very poorly in this class. I never defined my own working parameters, was often confused, and put up work that lacked commitment, just as I myself failed to commit to any given system. It was my creative writing course the next year that gave me the necessary perspective.
A workshop course, I found myself writing on story after story, telling authors not to write in all caps for emphasis, a device many of my classmates employed. It is loud, ungainly, inelegant, and generally discouraged by literary manuals. Not long after, however, I was reading a story by my favorite contemporary writer, Neil Gaiman, and encountered the very same formatting (in a few places). I sat back for a moment. Everything I knew told me that this was wrong, that not only shouldn’t I write that way, but it shouldn’t work. Yet her it was, staring me in the face, working. In a similar case, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road contains some examples of what would, analytically, be considered poor writing and formatting but, given his own use of these elements, works beautifully.
My job, I realized, wasn’t to honor each code and credo. As an artist, all you have to do is know what is possible, then do what works for you as regards the audience. You are breaking rules, yes, you know this, yes, but it works. Even within the boundaries, you are writing in a manner considered pedestrian by others, but you sell your work and gain great acclaim. And who’s to say your wrong? You act in the way that works for you. If that means analyzing your character, researching their setting, spending days in the library, so be it. If it means picking up the script and just going forward, you do that instead. If you have some modicum of talent, and your intentions are good, you will find your way. Make no mistake, intentions are important.
Perhaps the most influential book in the first years of college was the text The Empty Space by theatre guru Peter Brook. In it, he breaks down the entire institution of theatre into four basic categories: Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate. Each one has its own intricacies, but by and large they are drawn not so much from the results of these thespian efforts, but where they originate.
The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colorful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring.
Brook’s book deals with the purpose of theatre, a purpose that I have always struggled to find in my own work. Although I have written and made films, and often suspected this existed, I constantly failed to identify their raison d’être. Yet so often it became “deadly,” it was dull, hollow, trite. Not because I lacked ability, but because my own motivations lacked solidity. I knew how to do, I didn’t know why to do it.
Unlike Antonin Artaud and his diametric opposite Bertoldt Brecht, I have no desire to bring about social change. Brecht elucidates at length about his concept of alienation, the desired effect of which renders the audience critical and thinking, questioning and, hopefully, changing. In a similar vein, although a different fashion, Artaud rails against such stale pieces as Oedipus Rex, claiming that they lack immediacy and should be tossed out in favor of pieces that more speak to the current times, giving them power over current audiences. I am interested in neither of these, as fascinating as they were. Brecht is a powerful playwright, also an excellent theorist, as was Artuad. But in neither of their philosophies did I find my own way.
Artaud, passionate about the power of art (specifically theatre), fought for an elemental theatre, one full of power to arrest its audience, a theatre of “magic” and “sacred ceremonies,” but, ultimately, a theatre devoid of the substance that makes it enduring. Brecht, if I had to identify an Achilles heel, read too deeply into the importance of theatre, believing so strongly in its import (in a time when it was a fairly frivolous pursuit) that he added the following lines, in epilogue form, to one of his plays.
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t feel let down:
We know this ending makes some people frown.[…]
Was it stage fright made us forget the rest?
Such things occur. But what would you suggest?
What is your answer? Nothing’s been arranged.
Should men be better? Should the world be changed?
The sentiments beginning here are further expounded, and he entreats his audience to consider the play’s questions, to mull them over, to allow them to take seed and grow. Noble, noble thoughts, but to my mind, a bit overwrought. Better, definitely, than a “message” play that seeks to promote a single view, but more contrived and manipulative than, perhaps, necessary. I like the principles behind Brecht’s alienation-effect, but in the end felt that he went about his business a little strongly.
In art we have power. People are going to remember our chicken, samurai, and Lennon, so we shouldn’t abuse that. Over a decade after watching Twister, I still remember it as one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, but despite that, I remember it, whether I want to or not. While close to Brecht, and definitely appreciative of elements out of Artaud’s work as well as others, neither fit my own aesthetic, although I didn’t fully realize it for another year.
It was in Intermediate Acting, not a writing/directing class at all, that the question was raised: why do you want to tell stories? Throughout numerous film, writing, and art classes, no one had ever truly broached that, the most basic of questions. Listening to my classmates my own answer solidified.
There is an old saying that “We are the sum of our experiences.” In Religion 296 we studied Kant, who put forth the argument that, to rephrase his words, we are the sum of our understanding. Kant extolled logic, formulating his famous moral imperative around the notion that true, pure morality can be found only in understanding that is not tainted by personal, past experience. My own point of view would be a compromise between the two and, if pressed, I would formulate it as follows: We are the sum of our understanding of our experiences.
A challenging dialectic is all for naught if the audience members don’t care to think about it. Sicko might contain some valid points but is so viciously articulated that no one will give it a second thought except those who are already convinced. On the other hand, An Inconvenient Truth may be both things that the title implies, but if it’s as boring and flat as the man who narrates it, once again no one listens. The closer a story gets to demanding the audience think, the less likely (in my opinion) the audience is to do that thinking. If the audience knows precisely what the play is saying, or asking, it is easily categorized and dismissed. Conversely, we don’t always like to be confused, either. It is our job as artists, I have come to believe, to straddle this line between ambiguity and simplicity.
Stories can be both clear and opaque at the same time, and they should. Unnecessary abstraction serves only to confuse, not assist. A story should both make narrative sense (I am not so narrow in my definitions as Aristotle, but I sympathize) and yet not emotional sense. We should never be wondering what, precisely, is going on but rather, why. And I believe, in contrast to such artists as Harold Pinter, that the story should not be so frenetically incongruous as to discourage the audience from layering their own meaning onto it. Audiences strive for reason, and unlike those artists who see chaos and futility as an end (Charles Mee, Samuel Beckett) I feel that there is a sense to be made out of these, perhaps different for each person.
So in the end, my personal philosophy of art, perhaps always something like this, has evolved and been articulated into a much more precise dictum: entertain first, educate second. Audiences will always gravitate towards the best stories, even when they are mechanically inferior (The Da Vinci Code) or lacking in any substance beyond edge-of-your-seat adrenaline (Terminator: Salvation). But if you can engross your audience with these elements—story, structure, poetry, alacrity—then you can hope, reasonably so, that they will take that extra step and, having thoroughly enjoyed your work, give it a little bit of extra thought, even if it’s only in explaining it to a friend and piquing their curiosity.
December, 2009
Impact and Import
“Fairy tales are important not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
--G. K. Chesteron
A chicken. A samurai. John Lennon. Three esoteric non-sequeters, but they are tied together in a truly marvelous way in my mind, a way that has become indicative of why I tell stories.
We remember facts, my sophomore-year psychology professor told us, better when they are in context. A history date is nothing to us, but if we read about the events that took place on that date, as well as before and after, we will be far more likely to recall it. “Pick three things, any three things,” he told the class and, after a moment, he received the afore-mentioned “things”. “So,” professor Ohnesorge continued, “you’re walking to chapel and you have a chicken, when all of a sudden you’re attacked by a samurai. About to be overcome, John Lennon springs to your aid and beats the samurai. You continue on your way with the chicken.” A simple, ridiculous little anecdote created on the spot, but it’s now been well over two years since that day in class and, having forgotten much of textbook material, I still remember those three “things” and probably always will.
People can claim until they are blue in the face that fiction is precisely that, fictional and false, but learning to make movies is much more than that, and although I knew it from the start, it takes years to learn to articulate, exactly, how. Why is it any more than a pastime? And, if it’s so important, how do you approach it? With what reverence?
I began to write films long before I was troubled with these questions, and my first guide-book along the path to the perfect screenplay was Robert McKee’s Story. I came to this book years before college, in a screenwriting class I attended, and have read and re-read it multiple times since then. Early on, McKee promises that the book is “about principles, not rules.” Would that this were true.
Story provides a number of things. For the true novice, it paints a simple portrait of how to construct a screenplay, demonstrating formatting and taboos of the medium, and just starting out, this is all you want. However, once you’ve progressed a little further in your studies, you can truly appreciate the wealth of knowledge contained herein. Particularly arresting is his chapter on subtext, in which he states the following:
Two attractive people sit opposite each other at a candlelit table, the light glinting off the crystal wineglasses and the dewy eyes of the lovers. […] The lovers reach across the table, touch hands, and look longingly in each others’ eyes, say, “I love you, I love you”… and actually mean it. This is an un-actable scene and will die like a rat in the road.
This story is accompanied by the excellent axiom ‘When a scene is about what a scene is about, you’re in deep shit.’ Good advice. Very often true. But McKee, despite his earlier assurances, states this—like much of his book—as gospel. Nowhere, in his world, is there room for compromise. Nowhere does he step back and say, “This is all well and good, but if you know the rules you can also break them to great effect.” A little research into the man himself reveals a person so violently didactic that he’s been known to throw students out of his world-famous screenwriting seminars.
This, my first real foray into the world of cinema, provided a valuable and oft-used lesson to me: take everything with a healthy dose of skepticism. That isn’t to say that McKee is wrong. Not even the things that I, personally, take umbrage with are necessarily wrong. Different strokes, as the old saying goes, and that understanding is important as you study anything as potentially polarizing as art.
David Mamet is one of my favorite authors when it comes to the nature, practice, and business of the film industry. His duo of film books On Directing Film and Bambi Vs. Godzilla being complemented nicely by his book on acting (for theatre) True and False are wonderful entries into film. Being skeptical, however, is the only way to read a Mamet book or essay, for he is one of the most dogmatic writers in the field, a firebrand in every sense of the word.
“You always want to tell the story in cuts. Which is to say, through a juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected,” says Mamet early in his first chapter of On Directing Film. He writes succinctly, as just as McKee was a good place to start for novice screenwriters, Mamet provides a jumping-off place for aspiring directors who have only the vaguest understanding of the director’s role. Many books written on directing are vague, abstract pieces of philosophy (I’m thinking, specifically, of Sidney Lumet’s book) that provide little of practical use. I myself knew nothing of the film director’s job beyond his interaction with the actors, and Mamet provided a simple rubric for the job. Their tasks on the film set are, he states simply, “what to tell the actors and where to put the camera.” Mamet spells out simply and succinctly how the director should approach the script, tackling the oft-ignored job of shot-listing, which is, he says, their primary job.
Mamet also, in this book, condemns such conventions as the establishing shot and the use of Steady-Cam, a device used in film for long, unbroken shots that appear with relative smoothness. They are, he insists, antithetical to the true nature of filmmaking, whose tool is the cut, not the scene. I read this book while preparing my film (We Are the Sum) and, trusting relatively implicitly in Mamet, I struggled a great deal with these assertions. It was, at last, a combination of acting and short prose that moved me past my difficulties and allowed me to glean what worked for me from Mamet’s volumes and leave the rest.
In my introductory acting course we studied a number of acting methods, including Mamet’s own, stark approach to the art. We learner about Stanislavki’s “method.” We studied Uta Hagen, Brecht, Artaud, and others. It was a boggling initiation into a world far more complex than I had anticipated. Approach the play psychologically, says Stanislavski. Speak plainly, don’t embellish, says Mamet. Rely on your memory, says Lee Strasberg. In my own mind, I couldn’t make sense of all these systems, much less reconcile them to each other, nor should I. My problem was not in accepting each method’s validity, which I did unquestioningly, but rather in my accepting each method’s bearing on my own growth as an actor. Needless to say, I did very poorly in this class. I never defined my own working parameters, was often confused, and put up work that lacked commitment, just as I myself failed to commit to any given system. It was my creative writing course the next year that gave me the necessary perspective.
A workshop course, I found myself writing on story after story, telling authors not to write in all caps for emphasis, a device many of my classmates employed. It is loud, ungainly, inelegant, and generally discouraged by literary manuals. Not long after, however, I was reading a story by my favorite contemporary writer, Neil Gaiman, and encountered the very same formatting (in a few places). I sat back for a moment. Everything I knew told me that this was wrong, that not only shouldn’t I write that way, but it shouldn’t work. Yet her it was, staring me in the face, working. In a similar case, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road contains some examples of what would, analytically, be considered poor writing and formatting but, given his own use of these elements, works beautifully.
My job, I realized, wasn’t to honor each code and credo. As an artist, all you have to do is know what is possible, then do what works for you as regards the audience. You are breaking rules, yes, you know this, yes, but it works. Even within the boundaries, you are writing in a manner considered pedestrian by others, but you sell your work and gain great acclaim. And who’s to say your wrong? You act in the way that works for you. If that means analyzing your character, researching their setting, spending days in the library, so be it. If it means picking up the script and just going forward, you do that instead. If you have some modicum of talent, and your intentions are good, you will find your way. Make no mistake, intentions are important.
Perhaps the most influential book in the first years of college was the text The Empty Space by theatre guru Peter Brook. In it, he breaks down the entire institution of theatre into four basic categories: Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate. Each one has its own intricacies, but by and large they are drawn not so much from the results of these thespian efforts, but where they originate.
The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colorful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring.
Brook’s book deals with the purpose of theatre, a purpose that I have always struggled to find in my own work. Although I have written and made films, and often suspected this existed, I constantly failed to identify their raison d’être. Yet so often it became “deadly,” it was dull, hollow, trite. Not because I lacked ability, but because my own motivations lacked solidity. I knew how to do, I didn’t know why to do it.
Unlike Antonin Artaud and his diametric opposite Bertoldt Brecht, I have no desire to bring about social change. Brecht elucidates at length about his concept of alienation, the desired effect of which renders the audience critical and thinking, questioning and, hopefully, changing. In a similar vein, although a different fashion, Artaud rails against such stale pieces as Oedipus Rex, claiming that they lack immediacy and should be tossed out in favor of pieces that more speak to the current times, giving them power over current audiences. I am interested in neither of these, as fascinating as they were. Brecht is a powerful playwright, also an excellent theorist, as was Artuad. But in neither of their philosophies did I find my own way.
Artaud, passionate about the power of art (specifically theatre), fought for an elemental theatre, one full of power to arrest its audience, a theatre of “magic” and “sacred ceremonies,” but, ultimately, a theatre devoid of the substance that makes it enduring. Brecht, if I had to identify an Achilles heel, read too deeply into the importance of theatre, believing so strongly in its import (in a time when it was a fairly frivolous pursuit) that he added the following lines, in epilogue form, to one of his plays.
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t feel let down:
We know this ending makes some people frown.[…]
Was it stage fright made us forget the rest?
Such things occur. But what would you suggest?
What is your answer? Nothing’s been arranged.
Should men be better? Should the world be changed?
The sentiments beginning here are further expounded, and he entreats his audience to consider the play’s questions, to mull them over, to allow them to take seed and grow. Noble, noble thoughts, but to my mind, a bit overwrought. Better, definitely, than a “message” play that seeks to promote a single view, but more contrived and manipulative than, perhaps, necessary. I like the principles behind Brecht’s alienation-effect, but in the end felt that he went about his business a little strongly.
In art we have power. People are going to remember our chicken, samurai, and Lennon, so we shouldn’t abuse that. Over a decade after watching Twister, I still remember it as one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, but despite that, I remember it, whether I want to or not. While close to Brecht, and definitely appreciative of elements out of Artaud’s work as well as others, neither fit my own aesthetic, although I didn’t fully realize it for another year.
It was in Intermediate Acting, not a writing/directing class at all, that the question was raised: why do you want to tell stories? Throughout numerous film, writing, and art classes, no one had ever truly broached that, the most basic of questions. Listening to my classmates my own answer solidified.
There is an old saying that “We are the sum of our experiences.” In Religion 296 we studied Kant, who put forth the argument that, to rephrase his words, we are the sum of our understanding. Kant extolled logic, formulating his famous moral imperative around the notion that true, pure morality can be found only in understanding that is not tainted by personal, past experience. My own point of view would be a compromise between the two and, if pressed, I would formulate it as follows: We are the sum of our understanding of our experiences.
A challenging dialectic is all for naught if the audience members don’t care to think about it. Sicko might contain some valid points but is so viciously articulated that no one will give it a second thought except those who are already convinced. On the other hand, An Inconvenient Truth may be both things that the title implies, but if it’s as boring and flat as the man who narrates it, once again no one listens. The closer a story gets to demanding the audience think, the less likely (in my opinion) the audience is to do that thinking. If the audience knows precisely what the play is saying, or asking, it is easily categorized and dismissed. Conversely, we don’t always like to be confused, either. It is our job as artists, I have come to believe, to straddle this line between ambiguity and simplicity.
Stories can be both clear and opaque at the same time, and they should. Unnecessary abstraction serves only to confuse, not assist. A story should both make narrative sense (I am not so narrow in my definitions as Aristotle, but I sympathize) and yet not emotional sense. We should never be wondering what, precisely, is going on but rather, why. And I believe, in contrast to such artists as Harold Pinter, that the story should not be so frenetically incongruous as to discourage the audience from layering their own meaning onto it. Audiences strive for reason, and unlike those artists who see chaos and futility as an end (Charles Mee, Samuel Beckett) I feel that there is a sense to be made out of these, perhaps different for each person.
So in the end, my personal philosophy of art, perhaps always something like this, has evolved and been articulated into a much more precise dictum: entertain first, educate second. Audiences will always gravitate towards the best stories, even when they are mechanically inferior (The Da Vinci Code) or lacking in any substance beyond edge-of-your-seat adrenaline (Terminator: Salvation). But if you can engross your audience with these elements—story, structure, poetry, alacrity—then you can hope, reasonably so, that they will take that extra step and, having thoroughly enjoyed your work, give it a little bit of extra thought, even if it’s only in explaining it to a friend and piquing their curiosity.
