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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. History of the Short

  2. Defining the Short

  3. Starting the Script

  4. Developing the Idea

  5. Developing the Treatment

  6. Writing Dialogue

  7. Screenplay Format

  8. Writing the First Draft

  9. Testing the Script

  10. Launching Production

  11. Working with the Actors

  12. Working with the Crew

  13. Directing the Camera

  14. Preparing for the Shoot

  15. Producing Jonathan’s Turn

  16. Postproduction

  17. Hi-8 and Super VHS Cameras

  Appendix I. Festivals

  Appendix II. Selected Shorts

  Appendix III. Recommended Reading

  Index

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to Denny Levy

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the astute suggestions and tireless dedication of my editor, Cynthia Vartan; the supportive comments from Professor Jorge Preloran of the University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Carol Bardosh of New York University, playwright A. R. Gurney, and Ross Lowell, who all reviewed the manuscript and were generous with their time. Other helpful readers were Kay Michaels, Jeremy Arnold, Jim Spione, Robert Bengston, and my students at Columbia University.

  Special thanks to my research assistants Denny Levy, Leslie Holland, Carla Thompson, Rebecca Watson, and Jenny Bengston.

  Introduction

  THANKSGIVING. After dinner. People are scraping off the remnants from their pie plates. I suggest to a half-dozen guests that they come with me to watch a short film. Nobody moves. They keep on talking. Finally, after the third invitation, six people reluctantly follow me into a room with a VCR. On the way, one person says, “I may not stay the whole time.” Another says, “I’m supposed to be somewhere.”

  I have selected Time Expired by Danny Leiner. It’s the story of Bobby, who returns home after a stretch in prison for stealing money from parking meters. He is cool to his wife and receives ardent phone calls from his prison cellmate, Ruby, a transvestite. With the passion of Bette Davis fighting for her man, Ruby uses every feminine wile ever tried. Bobby lies to his wife to account for his time with Ruby, and he lies to his lover about letting some time go by before they resume their relationship. Eventually, Ruby forces a showdown, and his passion prevails.

  As the story unrolls, the remarks of my guests change. People are laughing. “This is much better than I thought it would be,” says the one who warned me he had to leave. “Why can’t we see things this good on TV?” asks an investment banker. The film has charm and candor. It is rooted in character truth and is funnier than the average sitcom with its quota of six to eight artificial laughs per minute. Unlike the sitcom, which is shot on one set, the short changes location. People laugh because the leading man never lets go of his working-class macho demeanor and his tough-guy New York accent. Everyone leaves with a smile.

  More shorts are being made today than ever before, owing to the energy and enthusiasm of film students. I have seen their talent firsthand while teaching screenwriting at Columbia’s School of General Studies. (My students come from Barnard, Columbia, the Graduate School of the Arts, and the working world of New York City.) Since it’s hard to write a feature film in a term or even two terms, I recently decided to teach the short film instead. Everyone wrote much better once the goal became writing two ten-minute scripts or one twenty-minute script in a semester. There was even time for a revision or two, which is very necessary since economy of communication can only be achieved by revision. I have now changed the curriculum so that students are first assigned to write a ten-minute almost silent script called “75 words,” in which students have to communicate their ideas visually. The next assignment is to write a twenty-minute short. Students are then asked to submit three premises (the unusual conditions on which the action of the film turns), which are read and discussed in class. Finally, the class and I come to agree on which is the best premise.

  When developing this curriculum, I discovered that there was no book on shorts that I could recommend to my students and that nobody had tried to explain how short-making differs from other forms of filmmaking. There were books on making expensive movies and nighttime TV shows but none that addressed the practical concerns of the student or beginning filmmaker on a limited budget. To fill this gap, I decided to write a book that would cover all facets of the short film from the writing of the screenplay to production and postproduction.

  My primary objective in Making a Winning Short is to pass on my knowledge of this medium to students as well as to beginning filmmakers and videomakers. I myself never went to film school full-time. I took night courses in television at American University in Washington, D.C., while serving in the Navy. I worked in the industry and managed to stumble into situations where I had opportunities to learn. I started by writing and directing shorts. The work was very hard, and there were no books or courses to guide me. But at that time, there was a great demand for shorts on TV, in theaters—where they were shown before the main feature—and in nontheatrical settings.

  This is no longer the case. The markets for shorts on TV and in theaters have dried up in the United States. But this situation is not permanent. Nor is it universal. In Europe, the former USSR, India, and other countries, the short remains an entertainment staple. My secondary goal in this book is to champion this form, to survey its riches, and perhaps to create more distribution opportunities. We are exposed to so much repetitive material that we hunger for an offbeat story like Time Expired. Yet despite the fact that many excellent shorts are available today, they have been muscled out of theaters by promotional trailers. The more the distributors are worried about the acceptability of their films, the louder and more frantic the trailer. We are the poorer for it. Shorts can communicate a wealth of experience—beyond the marketing decisions that govern TV and most movies—and the good ones come from the heart.

  Jorge Preloran, a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks that student shorts reflect the changes in society in many ways. They deal with drug use, sexual preferences, the impact of divorce on children, new family styles and strategies, youthful unrest, the search for direction, feelings of isolation, feelings about parents, materialism, religion, new mores versus old, the loss of social guidelines, wariness about government. These shorts put a changing world under a microscope and come up with some valuable insights. If only the public could have access to them!

  1

  History of the Short

  THE FIRST FILMS were silent shorts. Most films before World War I lasted from one to ten minutes, and the ten-minute film, or one-reeler, was the norm. In 1902, Georges Méliès, the French pioneer, made A Trip To The Moon, a film that still provokes laughter and pleasure. It is among the hundreds of shorts he created. The following year, the American Edwin S. Porter filmed The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, each lasting twelve minutes. These classic films were milestones in the development of the motion picture, and the latter opened our eyes to the power of crosscutting from one story to another.

  After “talking pic
tures” were introduced, the length of feature films expanded, but the short remained a staple at movie theaters. In the thirties and forties, when a ticket to the movies cost ten to fifteen cents for kids, twenty-five cents for adults, the show included a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, a cliff-hanging serial, an “A” picture, coming attractions, and a “B” picture. The movie studios had total control over production and groomed writers and directors by having them first work in the shorts and B-picture units, the film schools of their day. In the shorts unit, the studios also experimented with color and film techniques. Some shorts had stars such as Robert Benchley, Edgar Kennedy, Pete Smith, and the Three Stooges. There were even musical shorts in which audiences could watch big bands that they knew only from radio. The cheers and applause at the end of a short often would dwarf the response to a feature film. In serial shorts, audiences saw familiar characters working themselves out of a different jam every week.

  But the world changed. By the mid-forties, shorts began to disappear from theaters, only to reappear in the fifties and sixties when “art” houses began to flourish. Shorts and cartoons once again began to be a routine part of the movie bill.

  When I arrived in New York in 1958, the czar of shorts was a man who always spliced in a title for himself—which read “George K. Arthur Presents”—at the beginning of each film he distributed. Arthur, a slight, short man (appropriately) who spoke with a high-pitched British accent, had in the silent era played dramatic roles under the name George Brest. In 1963, when I telephoned him to ask him to look at my short, he said, “Shorts should be as short as possible. How short is yours?” “Twenty-four minutes,” I answered. “It’s called Happy Birthday to Me.”

  “Make it shorter, and I’ll see it.”

  “I guess I could cut a couple of minutes.”

  “You should take out eight minutes. Don’t recut the negative. Just cut the print.”

  “Eight minutes! I don’t see how I could.”

  “Call me when it’s ready.” Click.

  It may seem that he was tough and arbitrary, but, like most people in the film business, he was merely expressing the demands of his constituency—the theater managers who had to program films that would not compete with the main picture in terms of length or entertainment value.

  It took me quite a while to pull seven of those eight minutes, which I had laboriously written, directed, and edited. I decided to lock in the length at seventeen minutes. The film was about a rarely employed but hopeful actress on her thirtieth birthday. On the screen we see the reality of her life, but on the sound track we hear the fantasies of fame that drive her dreams. When he saw my film, George K. Arthur would not distribute it because it was too long. Nevertheless, I took it to Hollywood, along with my pregnant wife and $1,000 borrowed from a bank against my car.

  Making the film had drained all my savings. It had cost $13,000. Expenses were divided equally with my partner and cameraman, Richard Shore, the husband of Herma Shore, who played the lead. My talented sister, Kay Michaels, did the voice. In Hollywood, I finally found a mentor, Bruce Cohn Curtis, who got the film shown at Screen Gems, where studio chief Jackie Cooper gave me a job right after the baby was born. More about my firstborn, Jonathan, later.

  Four years later I made a short called A Year Towards Tomorrow, which showed the adventures of VISTA workers. It won an Oscar and was distributed in theaters on a double bill with The War Game. I read later that it was seen by more people than most theatrical films. Profits reverted to the VISTA program, which sponsored the film. Winning the Oscar helped get Happy Birthday to Me into distribution. George K. Arthur saw it in a new light. Now he could advertise it as the work of an Oscar winner. Money started to trickle in, and when we sold the film to German TV we came very close to recouping our expenses over a six- to seven-year period.

  Throughout the decades, a few attempts have been made to anthologize shorts into a feature-length film. In the fifties, three feature films based on stories by Somerset Maugham—Trio, Quartet, and Encore—were made in Britain and were quite popular. In the eighties, Canadian producer Rene Purlmutter brought out a feature consisting of shorts by women directors from around the world, and New York Stories, an anthology of three films directed by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola, was distributed as a theatrical film. There is also in theatrical distribution a series of film school shorts by now-famous people called Back to Film School.

  From the very beginning, TV was more successful with series than with shorts. For whereas a series offers the audience a familiar plot and predictable characters, a short is an unknown quantity; story line, characters, director—all are unknown to the viewer. Bernice Coe, of Coe Films, a leading distributor of the short film, sold shorts in the early fifties to Omnibus, the TV series hosted by Alistair Cooke. I also remember seeing A Time Out of War by Terry and Dennis Sanders, a narrative film about a temporary truce between two soldiers fighting on opposite sides in the American Civil War. In the seventies, when the cable era began, the short found a new niche in the entertainment landscape. Together with an HBO executive, Bernice Coe came up with the clever idea of filling the time between features with “interstitial” shorts so that movies could start on the hour, like network programs.

  Although shorts rarely are used on American TV today, there are some notable exceptions. One outstanding program is The Independents, a series of shorts on the Discovery Channel. In this ongoing series, anchored by stars such as Paul Mazursky and Glenn Close, the theme changes every thirteen weeks. A recent theme concerned the female point of view, and all the selected shorts were directed by women; the series was hosted by actress-director Jodie Foster. In addition, Chanticleer, a progressive and talented Hollywood company, has been making a series of shorts for the Showtime network. (Many of these films are on my list of favorites in appendix II.) Another recent development is America’s Funniest Home Videos. This TV series, which at one time was the top-rated show on the air, presents short nonprofessional videos submitted by viewers.

  Outside the world of entertainment, there is an entire industry that uses the short film to sell everything from gasoline to safe sex to company policy. I myself have toiled in this field and made about sixty such films, many of them narrative. They are all intended to persuade the viewer to believe something or to do something (to stop smoking, to give money, to respect the United States), as opposed to the primary goal of most narrative films, which is to entertain.

  One of the most prolific sources of narrative message films is the National Film Board of Canada. Since its founding in 1939, its mandate has been to make films that probe the history, politics, and social realities of Canada. It has won dozens of Oscars for live action and animated shorts, each of which fulfills the mandate but in a subtle and entertaining way. The U.S. government also funds films, though not as many as Canada. I have made some of my best shorts for the United States Information Agency (USIA), for the Office of Economic Opportunity, and for our armed forces. I made Beyond Silence (my first Oscar nominee), about a deaf girl going to Gallaudet College, for USIA. For the Office of Economic Opportunity, I wrote and directed three films, two of which were nominated for Oscars and one of which won.

  The field of sponsored nontheatrical films currently employs 35,000 people, who make 1,500 films per year. Many of these filmmakers have other irons in the fire and make their living producing industrials, while squirreling away the money to develop their feature projects.

  In fact, everyone who wants to create feature films begins by making a short. A short that is filmed to demonstrate one’s talent, to raise money for a longer work, or to get a job in the film industry is dubbed a calling-card short. Directors Francis Ford Coppola, Milös Forman, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Fred Zinnemann, Paul Newman, Susan Seidelman, Spike Lee, Randal Kleiser, and Robert Zemeckis all started out making a short. Many documentarians make the transition to film and TV with shorts. For instance, Ann Shanks made Mousie Baby to
demonstrate her dramatic credentials and, as a result, got a directing assignment for a TV movie. She went on to produce several successful TV movies.

  Despite the fact that the market for shorts is diminishing in the United States, more short films than ever are being produced by students in film schools and by amateurs wanting to explore their talents with the video camera. According to Richard Ross, former head of the New York University graduate film program and previously head of the Columbia Graduate School of Film, Columbia graduate students spend 68 percent of their time on shorts. (Unfortunately, they received no instruction in the subject until recently, when playwright and TV writer Corrinne Jacker began to teach the short film.) Ross says that at NYU alone almost 4,000 shorts are produced annually, making the school the largest 16mm customer in the United States.

  The appeal of shorts is understandable. They are not interrupted by commercials, and they are fun to view. Shorts made by young filmmakers who are not inured to commercial standards are often fresher than the formulaic series on TV. Although the rules for shorts are not as stringent as those for features or series TV, certain rules of dramatic writing still apply, as I will show in the chapters ahead.

  2

  Defining the Short

  HOW SHORT IS A SHORT ANYWAY? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences says that shorts should be less than thirty minutes. To sell your short to TV, you must keep its length under twenty-four minutes. If you want to make a calling-card short to show off your talent, fifteen minutes or slightly less is the ideal length. Adam Davidson’s film The Lunch Date, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and an Academy Award, was only eleven minutes long. The last minute packs a wallop and makes the film resonate in the mind over and over.

  Just as the length of a short is flexible, so, too, are the rules about its structure. Whereas all full-length feature films follow more or less the rules laid out by Robert McKee in his lectures and by Syd Field in his basic text Screenplay, the short dispenses with some of these structural mandates. (I’ll be discussing the rules that do apply to shorts throughout this book.)