Making a Winning Short Read online

  Shorts tend to be highly visual. They are closer to feature films than TV shows in the sense that more action is portrayed on the screen and the storytelling relies more on images than on dialogue. People in Hollywood prefer shorts with silent passages, so you will get farther in your search for financing or a job if you can incorporate such passages in your own work. This preference stems from the film industry’s reverence for the silent-film classics in which everything is communicated through the characters’ behavior, the camera, and the editing.

  One of the best examples of a silent short with a contemporary score is Skater Dater, written, directed, and edited by Noel Black. Not a word is spoken in this exquisite film, which shows one boy’s breakaway from the camaraderie of a skateboarding club to begin dating a girl on a bike. Filmmaker Black retains motion as his filmic vocabulary. Instead of Girl Meets Boy, it’s Girl Collides with Boy, she on a bike (a mode of transportation more suited to courtship than the male-conformist activity of skateboarding in unison). The film was nominated for an Academy Award.

  Many shorts have surprise endings, which make them highly memorable. Two consummate masters of the switcheroo ending were Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry, whose short stories finish with a sudden unexpected twist to the plot. An effective short based on one of O. Henry’s stories is Chaparall Prince, in which overworked Lena writes to the mother she ran away from about her slave-labor conditions. The stagecoach carrying her letter is robbed. One of the robbers reads her letter and rescues her. Closely related to surprise endings are false resolutions, which seem to end the film on an unsatisfactory note; they pave the way for the real ending, which comes as a relief and a surprise.

  For the filmmaker, using a well-known short story or novel can cut both ways. On the one hand, you don’t have to come up with your own story line, but on the other, you risk alienating the public if you put your own stamp on the film by changing names or aspects of the plot. Nevertheless, some successful TV series have been based on short stories: The American Short Story on public TV and The Ray Bradbury Theatre are two examples; the Maugham stories have already been mentioned. Among the recently made films from short stories are Greasey Lake, from the story by T. Coraghesson Boyle, and The Fifteenth Phase of the Moon, based on a story by Celia Roebuck Reed.

  Now that we have touched on some of the general characteristics of shorts, let’s turn our attention to the main categories in which shorts tend to fall. I came up with seven major categories of shorts after viewing such films over a two-year period and consulting with those in the know: film teachers at New York University, Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at Los Angeles; distributors such as Tapestry, Coe, Phoenix, and Pyramid; and producers such as the American Film Institute, Chanticleer, and Atlantis. The classifications are arbitrary, not infallible, and many shorts belong in more than one category. The following sections include descriptions of each category and illustrative examples. (For complete synopses of the shorts referred to and information on their distributors, see appendix II.) When reading this material, bear in mind that each successful short has a premise, an assumption the audience is asked to believe, which forms the basis of the story. In the short Board and Care, for example, the premise is that retarded teenagers have normal sexual longings.

  Science-Fiction Shorts

  These shorts are like the science-fiction genre of fiction in which an imaginary world mimics scientific developments, such as cloning (Jurassic Park) or robots (Robocop), and turns a scientific speculation into an assumed reality. In short films, there is no budget for special effects, but there are less expensive ways of creating a different world that reflects timeless truths.

  The sci-fi short 12:01 shows an inhibited man, on poor terms with the world, who has held the same job for twenty-three years. He suddenly finds himself repeating the same hour of his life until he realizes he can enjoy the recurring events and change some of them. The film was nominated for an Oscar, and the premise was turned into a feature film called Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, and into a TV movie.

  Another sci-fi premise is contained in Kaboom, directed by Gabrielle Luzzi. A man brings home a nuclear bomb as a novelty fad item. At first his wife is worried; then she treats it like a baby, and the dog plays with it. Neighbors drop in to admire the bomb, but soon they want their own, and finally, the fad becomes a threat.

  Metaphorical Shorts

  A metaphor is a way of showing reality by an invented comparison. In the novella Metamorphosis, for example, Franz Kafka’s character of Gregor wakes up as a giant cockroach and proves an embarrassment to his family, just as in real life Kafka’s writing brought shame to his conventional family.

  Two metaphorical shorts that are highly effective are Welcome to I.A. and Ray’s Heterosexual Dance Hall. In Welcome to I.A., no one hears what Paul is saying at his birthday party. He realizes he is having another attack of invisibility. Paul joins Invisibles Anonymous where he learns that when you start seeing other people, they start seeing you. Ray’s Heterosexual Dance Hall is a parody of male bonding. Businessmen court financial relationships as they seek out men as dancing partners. Dancing is a metaphor for romancing deals.

  Fantasies

  A fantasy is an imagined world that serves, like a pleasant dream, to resolve human pain. Intolerable reality can be corrected in a fantasy. In The Room, a boy of ten is held captive in his apartment by a tyrannical father. The boy fantasizes that his bed blasts off from the apartment like a spaceship and gently lands in the street below, where he is warmly greeted by neighbors. A similar film is End of the Rainbow, which shows a depressed, untalented musician playing his saxophone badly on his fire escape. When jeered from below, he jumps to the street. The fantasy locks in: He staggers to his feet. A woman hands him a sax, which he plays brilliantly, and the whole street joins in a wild musical number. When the film returns to reality, the street becomes deserted and the man lies dead on the cold pavement.

  With Hands Up takes its inspiration from a famous photograph snapped by a German photographer during World War II. The subject is an eight-year-old child in a newsboy hat, the picture of innocence, who has his hands up while being herded by the Nazis. When the wind blows his hat off, he chases it out of view to freedom. The Howie Rubin Story is about a young man who is an underachiever except in his fantasies, where he is admired by girls and interviewed on a major TV show about his life.

  In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a man fantasizes about idyllic happiness in the few seconds he has remaining while dropping from the bridge with a noose around his neck.

  Anthropomorphic Fantasies

  A related type of short endows animals or even a balloon or a chair with human qualities. In The Red Balloon, a film by Albert Lamorisse, a balloon bonds with a boy like a pet. When bullies puncture it, the boy is rescued and carried off by a whole bunch of balloons. A Chairy Tale, about a chair that takes on a life of its own, belongs in this category, as does White Mane, another Lamorisse film that features a free-spirited horse who escapes capture with the help of children. The Dog Ate It, discussed in chapter 5, also qualifies as an anthropomorphic short.

  Character Development

  In this genre, a protagonist is revealed or changed after being tested. In The Bet, we gradually see how insatiable and self-destructive is the addiction that grips a compulsive gambler. In Sandino Bambino, a bookish idealist does not realize the price he pays for being oblivious to reality until his father runs off with his girlfriend.

  Sometimes a character undergoes a change after being caught in a crunch between value systems. In shorts about immigrants, for example, old-country values and American values are often at odds. Carolina in The Fifteenth Phase of the Moon is torn between her parents’ Mexican values and her strivings as an artist and a first-generation American woman. With her mother’s help, she is able to leave home. The Russian émigré writer in The Laureate learns to give up his past struggles in Russia and to seek happiness in America. There is a cultural conflict of another sort in Halmani when a Korean grandmother and her granddaughter have clashing values.

  Character can also be developed through an odd-couple relationship. In Night Movie, an Israeli soldier bonds with and trusts an Arab captive, who is later rashly shot by his fellow soldiers. In Graffiti, a young artist cleverly tweaks the military dictatorship of his country with his graffiti until he sees a young woman who does similar drawings being carried off to be tortured.

  Character change often involves giving up something that holds you back. In The Last Days of Hope and Time, a man who was almost but not quite recruited by major basketball teams has to give up the dream that keeps him on the basketball court in the park. Characters also change when they defy society. The lead in Birch Street Gym joins a boxing club for senior citizens and boxes even when everyone in his retirement home urges him to be sedentary.

  Rites of Passage/Memoirs

  A rite of passage is a highly charged experience in the life cycle, such as realizing that parents are not perfect, discovering self-worth, being in love for the first time, having a first child, growing older. On film, these experiences are usually portrayed in a warm and sentimental manner, which suits those in the audience who have already gone through them. Seeing a rite of passage depicted on the screen may be painful, however, to the person who is currently undergoing that experience. Other autobiographical material also falls under this heading. For example, the short Portrait of Grandpa Doc remembers the warm, gentle mentor of the filmmaker’s childhood. In Tell Me, two girls promise to go through puberty together, telling each other everything from the first kiss on. But one develops breasts before the other, spoiling the bond. In How Sticky My Fingers, How Fleet My Feet, men in their thirties face the decline of their physical strength when playing touch football in the park with a sixteen-year-old.

  Parodies

  There are roughly two kinds of spoofs—critical and reverent. Day of the Painter is a critical spoof about people who profit from facile modern art. The Dove, on the other hand, is a reverent satire of Ingmar Bergman’s movies, made when he was the world’s leading film artist. Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, told me that Bergman saw the film unexpectedly in a theater and was practically on the floor laughing. He has since bought a copy and plays it frequently. Missing Parents is about runaway parents who find a shelter for abused parents—a satirical switch on missing children.

  3

  Starting the Script

  Getting the Idea

  Wisps of gossamer float in the mind—fallout from childhood memories, haunting passages from books, movie scenes that we rerun on our inner screen, things we remember, things we heard. The writer collects these shiny filaments and twists them together into threads, then weaves the threads into a tapestry which is the script.

  The best shorts reveal pungent truths that grow out of the filmmaker’s personal experience of living. The trick is to get in touch with what you already know, to trust your instincts, and to allow your writing to expand beyond the literal truth; then you must look at your script with a critical eye, revise as necessary, and expose it to the slings and arrows of your friends and colleagues.

  Have you ever experienced something and wished you had a camera because you knew nobody would believe you? Have you held people spellbound when telling a particular anecdote from your life? Maybe you have told a story at a bar or a party, and the laughter kept on rolling. The seed of a film script often lies in these situations. In a short narrative film, you can build a story around a core of truth. You can edit and shape your material in any number of ways. It is simply a matter of writing up the event or encounter, showing a set of fictional causes, and persuading the audience to believe the story as it unrolls on the screen.

  Draw Ideas from a Journal

  “I bruise easily. And when I bruise … I write,” said S. J. Perelman, our greatest modern humorist. Like Perelman, you can record your own bruises, distasteful encounters, and frustrations. Write down in a journal the witty ripostes you make to yourself once it’s too late to attack the person who has insulted you. If you’re like me, you rewrite your verbal swordplay after you have been trounced in an actual exchange. But in the rewrite of the dialogue with loud drivers and brusque officials, we come away clear winners. And we can hone our unspoken dialogue long after the confrontation. Similarly, a script for a short is the chance to correct the sloppiness of everyday life with brilliant afterthoughts.

  Three Ideas for Shorts

  I think of how frisky my VCR is. I set it carefully, looking from the monitor to the instruction book, trust that I am ready to record programs, and something happens. All the instructions are erased. Maybe there is an idea for a short here: a man finds that his electrical appliances are rebelling against him. The toaster burns his toast. The water purifier turns his water brown. He sets the VCR to a football game, but it records a sermon.

  * * *

  A favorite story comes to mind that began on Thanksgiving, 1968. It concerns my son, Jonathan, the one who was born in Hollywood right after I moved there to further my film career. It’s four years later. I am divorced, living in New York and frequently working in Washington. I have a second son who’s three years old, a year younger than Jonathan. I take the boys to a family party on Thanksgiving so they can meet their cousin Peter from Washington. Compared to his self-confident cousin, Jonathan seems shy. He grabs my leg, peeks at Peter, and says nothing. When Peter speaks to him, he stares at the floor.

  “What’s a cousin?” asks Jonathan later.

  “He’s like a brother, but you don’t have to live with him.” That seemed like found treasure to young Jonathan, already burdened by living with a competitive younger brother. For two months, Jonathan talked of nothing but Peter.

  Then, in February of 1969, Jonathan had a chance to see Peter again. I was scheduled to be in Washington for two events. One was the showing of a new film on a neighborhood health center for a senatorial committee. After that, I had to direct a crew at a press conference with the vice president. I invited Jonathan to come along with me on the trip. My cousin Linda promised to meet us at the Washington airport and care for Jonathan while I attended to business. But when we got on the plane at La Guardia, it developed a flat tire and the flight was delayed; by the time we reached Washington, Linda had given up and left the airport.

  My heart pounded as we rode to the Senate building. The screening would be over by the time we got there, but maybe the crowd would linger so I could get the senators’ reactions. I told Jonathan that I didn’t want him to act like a baby; that we were going to be with very important senators who pass all the laws and who wanted children to be quiet while they talked business.

  When we got out of the taxi, he refused to take my hand and follow me.

  “Carry me,” he said.

  “Carry you? Why?”

  “I’m afraid the men won’t like me.” As I carried him up three flights of marble stairs, I wished I hadn’t intimidated him.

  Huffing and puffing, I arrived at the committee room, with Jonathan still in my arms, expecting the film to be over. It had not even started. Several aides were clustered around the projector. By the time they got it working, I had to leave for the White House. What to do with Jonathan? I spied a woman who was the central character of the film, a poor woman who had probably never been outside Denver since she and her husband had eloped there from Mexico. The committee had flown her in for the screening. I asked this woman, Maria Guzman, if she would watch my child. She hesitatingly agreed. I gave her Linda’s phone number, she gave me the number of her boardinghouse, and I gave Jonathan money for taxis.

  I went to the White House, got my cameraman a good position, waited for the press conference to end, and then dashed to one of those press phones where reporters call in their stories. I reached Maria Guzman, who said, to my amazement, that Jonathan had taken charge of everything. Before he got into a cab, he checked all the tires so the same morning mishap would not recur. He told the driver that his father was at the White House, so they had better not get lost. When they arrived at the boardinghouse, he handled the fare and the tip. After all, he was a seasoned New Yorker and Maria Guzman never took cabs in Denver.

  Once at Maria’s, he kept calling Linda until he reached her at home; then he called a taxi and had Maria copy down the cab’s number. As the cab pulled away, Maria could hear Jonathan telling the driver that his father was with the vice president. Later, when I met the boys and Linda in front of the White House, the cousins were chasing each other. Clearly, Jonathan had emerged from his shell and come into his own. On the plane back we both breathed a sigh of relief as he fell asleep against me.

  * * *

  Another experience. Recently I went to a blood center for tests ordered by my doctor. Something about the place was askew. It was in a seedy brownstone. The sign on the door had letters missing: “Un ed Me c l T st g.” Another sign said to ring the bell to be buzzed in, but after several rings the door never opened. Eventually, someone exited, and I snuck in. The receptionist was on the phone speaking aggressively in a German accent. When she was finished, she told me to sign a sheet. I tried to tell her that I had forgotten to bring along my doctor’s instructions but he could be reached by phone. She seemed unable to process this information and told me to wait. Finally, she called my name and asked for my doctor’s instructions. I again told her I had forgotten them and said she could call his office and find out the tests he wanted me to take.

  “What’s his number?” she asked.

  I gave his name and street address.