Best Lesson Ever in Hollywood Screenwriting
If you want to write for Hollywood, study this picture.
This faded lobby card from Charles Chaplin’s The Kid is the best lesson you’ll ever have in how to write for the movies. Despite its age, it illustrates many of the essential elements you’ll need to keep in mind today as your write your Hollywood screenplay. It’s a visual reminder of the kind of movie that producers, studios and – most importantly – audiences are looking for.
And that’s no accident. This lobby card had a specific purpose: to bring people into the theater. Chaplin chose this particular image because it effectively answers the first three questions that are always on the mind of the audience when the lights go down on a Hollywood movie.
1) Who is the hero?
2) What important thing does the hero want?
3) Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
The First Three Questions are important to your audience because they bring into focus the central conflict of the movie. The nature of the conflict is what the audience is curious about when the show begins. And, in large part, they will judge the movie as good or bad depending on how the conflict unfolds and how the conflict is resolved.
Your audience may initially be drawn to the theater with the promise of rampaging dinosaurs or a steamy shower scene of a voluptuous movie star. And your job as a writer is to deliver the most compelling dinosaur rampage or steamy shower scene ever put on film
But your audience has another expectation – a storyline based on conflict that is dramatic and compelling. And they’ll be disappointed if you don’t deliver on that, as well.
This is true today and it was true in 1921, when The Kid was first released. And right there on the lobby card, Chaplin clearly addresses the audience’s First Three Questions…
According to the card, this movie promises a conflict between Charlie and the Cop, and their struggle will be over The Kid.
The First Three Questions in the mind of the audience are based on the primary ethical question that all heroic drama attempts to answer: What should I do? The author of a heroic screenplay says “Watch the hero and do what he does.”
That’s why, in every heroic screenplay, there are moral questions at stake. It’s these moral issues that are the source of the conflict. For our purposes, conflict is defined as the active clash between characters caused by incompatible, opposing moral principles.
In the simplest terms, the Hero and the people who oppose him represent the two sides of a moral question. Their conflict during the course of the movie is a cinematic moral argument about which side is correct. Whoever wins the conflict decides the moral question.
Cinematic should be your focus. Your movie will not be a dry, dusty, academic argument made by chin-pulling, pipe-sucking professors in a lecture hall. Your movie will be a gripping, emotional, entertaining argument thrashed out by the dramatic actions of your main characters and supported by film technique.
What moral arguments are you going to make? There’ll be at least two.
First, your film will attempt to prove the general moral principle that “doing the right thing is worth the struggle, because it achieves or restores the good.” If your Hero struggles against his opponents to do the right thing, and by the end of the film achieves or restores the good, he’s won the argument.
But there will be a second moral argument, as well. This argument will be about the particular moral theme of the movie. For example, in The Kid, the moral theme concerns whether Charlie – alone, poverty-stricken, and with a larcenous heart – should be allowed to care for an orphaned child.
The lobby card sets ups this moral question perfectly – one one side is the issue is the Cop, who will strongly oppose the idea of Charlie caring for the child. On the other side is Charlie, who wants to hold onto the Kid. And in the middle is the Kid himself, the “important thing” that the hero wants.
In short, the lobby card is an illustration of the dramatic and compelling moral argument of the film, which accounts for its power to attract an audience.
Simple, right? The lobby card pretty much lays is all out right in front of you.
But there’s much more going on in this photo. Take another look at that Cop.
The Kid was released in 1921. In this early 20s, most cops in comedies looked like this:
Cops in comedies were…well…comedy cops. The most famous of them all were the Keystone Cops, seen above. Here is how they were described when they honored with a 29 cent American stamp several years ago:
“From 1914 through the early 1920s, moviegoers were entertained by the antics of the silent screen’s most irreverent and incompetent police force, the Keystone Cops. Dressed in ill-fitting, disheveled uniforms, this merry band of misguided gendarmes stumbled through a series of chaotic chase scenes in the name of law and disorder.”
Chaplin could have used Keystone-like Cops for his movie, but he didn’t. Take a good look at the type of cop Chaplin chose for Charlie’s opponent…
Does this Cop look “incompetent? “Disheveled?” “Stumbling?” Does he look like part of a “merry band of misguided gendarmes?”
Let’s face it…there’s nothing merry about this guy at all. This is not a comedy cop. In fact, he looks downright threatening. Consider the way he and Charlie are posed together.
Charlie is small and crouched in the gutter. The Cop is tall and looms over Charlie on the sidewalk. Charlie is slender and slight, the Cop is a manly figure.
Charlie comforts a cuddly baby in his hands. In the Cop’s hands is a hard, wooden billy-club, tightly gripped.
You can just imagine the Cop biding his time, patiently tapping the nightstick against the palm of his hand, waiting for just the right moment to give Charlie ‘s head a good whack, followed by a poke in the ribs. “No vagrants on my beat, you bum. Ankle off and keep moving. Hey, wait a minute…where’d you get the brat?”
Chaplin wanted to create the impression of threatening power in the Tramp’s opponent and he succeeded. But it’s not only physical power that the Cop displays, he represents another kind of power, just as threatening.
The Cop is in uniform.
He’s got stripes on his sleeve, a cap on is head and a badge on his coat. In short, he has authority. If Charlie tangles with the Cop, he tangles with City Hall.
Charlie’s opponent is more than just this single cop. The Cop in the lobby card represents authority in The Kid. By the middle of the movie, the entire weight of government is going to come crashing down on Charlie’s head, along with the Cop’s nightstick. There will be no one in authority to protect Charlie because the people in authority are the very ones out to get him.
These guys.
By the end of the film, the entire apparatus of municipal authority – police, doctors, city social workers – are trying to take the Kid from Charlie’s care. So the authority that the Cop wields is just as powerful as his nightstick, making him an even more dangerous figure.
And for the sake of the conflict, that’s a good thing…the more threatening the opponent is to the hero, the more the story will excite and move the audience. That’s why the hero needs strong and credible opponents, not opponents who are weak or too improbable to be believed.
By selecting a threatening Cop and the authority he represents over a Keystone Cop for his movie, Chaplin has successfully made the necessary choice for the type of heroic story he intends to tell. He’s created a credible opponent for the Tramp with a strong stake in winning.
But the hero, too, needs a strong stake in winning. Whatever it is the hero wants to achieve or hold on to, it has to be important. So important, the he will put himself on the line to keep it. Does this look important to you?
It does to most of us. Parenthood is one of the things we feel most passionately about. The forced separation of a child from his mother or father is guaranteed to arouse emotion and sympathy. (In preparation for this post, I screened the movie and my wife saw the film for the very first time a few days ago. At a key moment when the Kid is being forcibly removed from Charlie, I caught her sniffing back tears.) This nearly 90-year-old silent comedy still had the ability to move us emotionally because it’s about something that matters.
In the lobby card, Charlie is clearly bonded to the child. He holds the helpless infant tenderly, lovingly, protectively. He’s portrayed as a father figure, and we expect fathers to fight strenuously on behalf of their children.
Chaplin made a wise choice for his first Heroic movie. If the nature of the conflict is intense – if the hero chooses to struggle mightily against an opponent who seems to hold all the cards – then we are inspired by the hero’s courage and dedication to do the right thing. Our emotions are fully engaged by the conflict. In a well-constructed story, we identify with the hero. Which means that if the struggle is important to the hero, then it becomes important to us, too.
Take another look at the pose of Charlie and the Cop.
You’ve heard the term “underdog” before. It describes two dogs testing each other’s dominance over the other. Cringing, the weaker dog will roll on his back as a sign of submission while the stronger dog stands tall above him. In this way, the “top dog” asserts his dominance over the “underdog.” Likewise, the difference in posture and positioning between Charlie and the Cop illustrates the dominance of the Cop over Charlie. Charlie is the “underdog” in this story.
And that’s just what Chaplin wants the audience to believe. In public, he most often referred to his Tramp character as “The Little Fellow.” Now, you know why.
Chaplin wants the audience to identify with the “The Little Fellow.” Audiences tend to root for the underdog because, in our own lives, we identify with the underdog – we see ourselves as the underdog.
Children have parents, teachers, bullies and older siblings to battle against. Adults have bosses, government, society and mother-in-laws as their opponents. In the narrative spin we give our own lives, we always appear to be clashing with forces much greater than ourselves. Our victories seem more significant if we feel that we’ve battled the odds and won.
Surely, when facing important moral issues, we feel as if we are fighting something much more powerful than ourselves. Sometimes we feel it’s us against the world. This feeling is perfectly captured in Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down…
Well I know what’s right, I got just one life.
In a world that keeps on pushin me around.
But I’ll stand my ground
…and I won’t back down.
This is the way we feel emotionally when contemplating our struggles against the hardships and vicissitudes of life. We cast ourselves as underdogs against an entire world that keeps “dragging me down” and “pushing me around.” But we “know what’s right” (making this a moral issue…we’re not fighting for the hell of it – we’re fighting because we’re right) and that “there ain’t no easy way out” (meaning we’ll have to struggle). So we “stand our ground” and struggle to do the right thing.
If we see ourselves as the underdog in our own life story, then, in order for us to identify with the hero, it’s often the case that the hero needs to be the underdog, too. In that way, the hero’s emotional journey of frustration, struggle and triumph, becomes our emotional journey, as well. That’s the power – and the pleasure – of identifying with the hero in stories. It’s one of the main reasons we are drawn to heroic drama.
Even someone like James Bond – as heroic a figure as you can imagine – is presented as an underdog in his movies. The screenwriters are careful not to have him struggle against criminals such as purse snatchers or shoplifters. Bond would easily defeat them; it would be no struggle at all. Instead, Bond is pitted against criminals that are powerful megalomaniacs, out to conquer the world. Only against opponents like this – a Goldfinger or a Blofeld – could Bond be considered an underdog. It’s long been noted that the best Bond films feature his strongest opponents.
So Chaplin needs his character to be perceived as an underdog because it resonates with us emotionally, and it makes his struggle significant. But being the underdog also promotes another key element that is important to the Hollywood screenplay.
Take another look at Charlie and the Cop, paying attention to the composition.
A very important element to this photo is that Charlie is unaware of the Cop. This element is so important, that Chaplin uses it in other publicity shots for The Kid. Like this one…
Chaplin even reversed the idea. Here’s the same Cop and street corner, but now it’s the Cop who is unaware of Charlie and the Kid…
And here is a French poster of the same idea.
The hidden face, Darth Vader shadow and highlighted billy-club, make the French poster even more threatening!
All these photos portray either the hero or his opponent as being unaware of the other.
In the lobby card photo, Charlie is unaware that the Cop is watching him. But we, the audience, are aware of the Cop. This means that we have knowledge that Charlie doesn’t, and this creates psychological tension within us. This tension is suspense, that is, the excited expectation of an approaching climax. In the most basic of terms, something exciting is going to happen and we want to see it.
Suspense is an extremely potent element of storytelling, pulling the audience along scene by scene from start to finish. Several times in the story, Chaplin has the boy’s mother meet the Kid, unaware that the child she’s speaking to is her own abandoned son. The suspense in these scenes is almost unbearable – you want the mother to recognize the child, at the same time you worry what will happen to Charlie when she does.
In a well-constructed screenplay, this type of gripping emotional tension can last the entire movie. But individual scenes, too, will have their arcs of tension. Look at how Chaplin brilliantly builds suspense in this short scene from The Kid below.
Twice he has the Cop appear unnoticed behind Charlie and the Kid. From the moment the Cop appears, Chaplin has constructed this scene to keep the audience wondering: what will happen next? Chaplin knew the power of suspense in his movie, and he was wise enough to include it as part of his lobby card and other images promoting the film.
The comedic cousin of suspense is anticipation, which is defined as pleasurable expectation. The emphasis here is on pleasurable, and this probably more accurately describes our response to the lobby card. Charlie and Cops have a long history of comic battle. When the audience sees an image like this, they know what’s coming and have faith that Chaplin will give them a good time.
So Chaplin has two types of suspense going for him in the lobby card – we anticipate the specific humorous revelation to Charlie of the Cop behind him, and we are filled with suspense over the more general struggle of the heroic underdog against his opponents.
But here’s another thing to consider about this card: if you didn’t know it was a Charlie Chaplin movie, would you think it was a comedy?
You’ve probably memorized it by now, but let’s take one last look at the photo of Charlie and the Cop. And this time, we’ll use the original photo that the lobby card was based on.
Just as the Cop himself is not funny, this whole situation is not funny. Where’s the humor in a derelict tramp finding an abandoned baby in the gutter? This isn’t a humorous premise…this is serious stuff, and not at all what Chaplin’s audience was used to.
When Chaplin arrived at the Keystone studios in Hollywood in 1914, the silent film comedies of the time were very primitive. They were little more than 1 or 2 reels of frenetic action.
A typical plot consisted of a girl in a park being energetically and ridiculously wooed by rival suitors. It was followed by a sustained head-conking, ass-kicking, brick-tossing, rough-house battle between the boyfriends, ending with a wild chase through city streets in open-air jalopies until the road ends and everyone careens off a cliff to certain death. Except they don’t die, they just brush themselves off and continue to chase each other into the sunset. The End.
Over the years, Chaplin refined his stories and his characters, but the plots and action were still pretty wild. Silent movies especially lend themselves to a type of twilight existence – half reality, half dreamworld, where anything can happen. That’s fine for a 20 minute two-reeler, but longer narrative forms of serious purpose demand something more. They demand a story that matters.
Chaplin wanted to do a comedy with strong emotions, and that means a moral theme – a comedy where the Tramp “struggled to do the right thing” because that’s what generates the emotion. In short, he wanted to make a Heroic Hollywood movie.
Which meant Chaplin, led by his artistic ambitions, had a problem on his hands. He had to introduce moral seriousness into his brand of knock-about, rough-house comedy. But how do you accomplish such a serious purpose in a movie full of pratfalls and butt-kicking? How would the audience react to a comedy attempting pathos?
Which is probably why his marketing efforts desperately attempted to reassure his audience that The Kid was, indeed, a comedy despite it’s serious premise. More than merely humorous, the film was promoted as Six Reels of Joy! as the various posters insistently promised.
Oh, yeah…you can just feel the rib-tickling joy radiating from Charlie and the Kid in these posters, can’t you?
Well, no…you can’t.
That’s the problem Chaplin faced with his film – it was a comedy, yet heartbreakingly serious. It was a very risky undertaking, and in the hands of a lesser artist (IYKWIM / AITYD) may well have been a disaster. But The Kid ended up being the second biggest film of the year and served as an example for other comedians of the day of how to make comedies with serious, heroic themes.
That’s the beauty of the Hollywood formula. As I’ve argued previously, the Formula appears to be inflexible and artistically stifling. But if you look deep within it, and understand the reasons behind each part of the Formula, it becomes a source of inventive inspiration. Chaplin created something new by figuring out how to wed his type of comedy with the heroic Hollywood Formula. He didn’t pursue creativity by shunning the Formula; he embraced it and found his vision within it. Heroic movie-making lifted his work to a new level of artistry.
Chaplin portrayed various types of characters in his movies – a fireman, a floorwalker, wealthy cads, drunks, and assorted rounders. But in this movie, he reprised his iconic role of the Tramp. The illustrations of Charlie and the Kid that appeared in the posters above must have been quite a shock for his audience.
After all, his Tramp character was a free spirit – roguish and vulgar. The Tramp was a vagrant with spotty employment, at home in the streets, and a lawbreaker when opportunity presented itself. Tramps, by their nature, are escaping the responsibilities of life – no job, no wife, no children.
It is not in the Tramp’s nature to make a long-term commitment to care and provide for a child. If the film had presented Charlie and the Kid as father and son from the moment the curtain rose, it would have struck the audience as terribly false.
Which is why Chaplin took great pains at the beginning of the film to show how circumstances force the freewheeling, irresponsible Tramp to “man up” and make a fundamental ethical choice to care for the child. Seeing the Tramp tenderly caring for the Kid in the lobby card is a reminder that the moral choices that a character makes are at the heart of heroic drama.
For the first time, Chaplin’s Tramp exhibited a full-fledged character arc, that is, the character moving from one viewpoint to another during the course of the movie, prodded by the ethical choices he confronts.
The amount of character arc the hero experiences will vary from film to film. For some movies, like the wonderful suspense film ffolkes the needle barely budges. (A moral theme of ffolkes is the need for rough men who “stay the course” and Roger Moore, in his best role, does exactly that…he doesn’t change very much, which is exactly why he saves the day.) For other movies, the character arc of the hero does a complete 180 – he comes to believe the exact opposite of his initial belief.
The important thing to remember is that character arc is a reflection of the shifting ethics of the hero. How much you want his ethics to shift depends on the moral point of the story you want to tell.
At the time of The Kid, Chaplin’s “Little Fellow” was not only the most famous movie character in the world, he was also the most beloved. And it is critically important to the success of heroic movies that the character is likeable.
“Likeable’ covers a lot of ground. Objectively, the Tramp character was a petty criminal, reckless and opportunistic. Yet, he made the world laugh, and that goes a long way towards creating likability for your character. A character can do the most repulsive, disgusting things – but if they’re done with humor, you can forgive him his faults.
Think of Shrek. Moments after being introduced, we see the monstrous ogre showering in mud, using bugs as toothpaste, and so on. His pointed grossness was so over-the-top that it made you laugh and instantly form a rapport with the hero. This likability carried the audience into the picture long enough for them to discover why they really liked him: his noble soul and the yearning of his heart, as the story eventually revealed.
And so it is with the Tramp in The Kid. First, Chaplin used humor to make the audience like him (despite his faults), then used his heroic struggle to earn their heartfelt love and admiration.
Whew! There’s a lot going on in that lobby card. As you outline your next screenplay, take a look at the lobby card of Charlie, the Cop and the Kid occasionally and ask yourself these questions as you consider your own story:
Who is the hero?
What scenes will I write to make the hero likable?
What important thing does the hero want?
Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
What scenes will show them in conflict?
Is their conflict based on incompatible, opposing moral principles?
How do I show these moral principles in conflict cinematically, not through dialogue?
What scenes will I write that portray the hero as an underdog?
How will I make the hero’s opponents even stronger?
How will I make the hero’s struggle more intense?
How do I build suspense throughout the movie?
How do I build suspense within each scene?
How big is my hero’s character arc?
What scenes will I write that will shift the hero’s moral viewpoints?
It is important to note that these are not questions about a style of writing, clever wordplay or beautiful phrasing – these are questions about structure because structure is what matters in your screenplay, first and foremost.
And the First Three Questions in the mind of the audience supply the framework of the movie. They provide the key structural boxes that you will build your film around – the Hero Box, the Nemesis Box, and the Quest Box
I’ll have more to say about each of the issues above in future posts, as we get deeper into the writing process. But my next post will be about the very beginning of your screenplay – you know, that first moment when an idea pops into your head and you say to yourself, “Hey, that’d make a good movie!” I will tell you how do decide if that idea actually will make a good movie or not. See you then!
Previous Heroic Hollywood posts found here.