From Issue 2:

The screenwriting process, I discovered, doesn’t stop when the writer hands in the final draft.  A film is re-written many times in the production and post-production process by choices made by directors, actors, producers, editors and technicians.  These choices can have a significant impact on the whole concept of the work, evolving it into something more, and sometimes less, than the vision the screenwriter has laboured to put down on paper. 

I have always assumed that opportunities to shape the narrative continued deep into the process, but because most of my work has been in pre-production I was rarely able to see just how true that is.  Then I had one of those out-of-the-blue phone calls last spring.  In the language of myths that I examine in my book, The Writer’s Journey, this was my Call to Adventure.

The voice on the line was that of actor Steve Guttenberg, veteran of mainstream Hollywood entertainment such as Police Academy, Cocoon, Diner and Three Men and a Baby.  He said he was a fan of my book and that he wanted my help on a new project that he was undertaking.  He was about to start shooting his first feature film as a director, an adaptation of the Broadway play P.S. Your Cat is Dead.

Steve was now just a few weeks away from starting to shoot the movie.  He had secured financing, had co-written the script with standup comedian and screenwriter Jeff Korn, and would serve as producer as well as directing and acting in the film.  He would play Jimmy Zoole, a down-and-out actor.  He wanted my help in looking over the script before going into production.

I jumped at the chance to influence a ‘go’ picture.  Much of what I do, even for major studios, is working on scripts that might be made, someday.  This was more immediate and real than ninety per cent of the projects with which I deal.  I agreed to serve as a consultant, one of several who would help guide Steve through the process of making an independent film.

I fell in love with the editing process, realizing that it is an extension of the writing process.  I relished the chance to shape the narrative, to seek out and emphasize different themes, to direct the thoughts and feelings of the audience.

We were joining in the writing of the film, in the telling of the story, as fully as the screenwriter.  We were able to make choices over such things as point of view, degree of comic intention, level of intensity, tempo, rhythm and velocity.  For example, we made the choice early on to tell the story primarily from the actor’s point of view, on the writer’s principle that the story belongs to whichever character has the greatest distance to travel. 

We did much of the writing with silence.  In many cases, lines of dialogue had been written and filmed to explain things or to express a character’s reaction to a dramatic turn, but we found that a more effective statement was to say nothing, or to find a hint of a smile or a glint in the actor’s eye that said it better than words.

In one scene, a critical moment when the actor rings up a shady friend of his, inviting him to come up and harass the tied-up burglar, we struggled for a long time with the dialogue on the other end of the phone call.  Lines had been written and shot, showing a character receiving the call on the other side of town, but the footage was technically flawed.  We decided not to use it, leaving us free to write any dialogue we wanted for the other end of the phone call.  It was a tempting opportunity to suggest a number of ideas that would help to explain Steve’s motivation or add shades of menace, and we wrote and recorded several versions of this call.  However, it occurred to me that we could also delete that half of the conversation so that we only heard Steve.  When we tried it, we found the effect was electrifying.  It threw much more weight into Steve’s character and his action, making him appear more brutal and calculating.  It also gave more emphasis to the burglar who is listening intently to Steve’s conversation for clues about his fate and it put the audience in the same position.

This experience was but one example of a principle that kept asserting itself in the editing (re-writing) process.  Every time we made a change, especially when we cut something to which we had become attached, we would discover three or four unexpected benefits from the change.  There was abundant endorsement for the idea that ‘Less is more’.

Christopher Vogler is the author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, based on the ‘Hero's Journey’ concept of American mythologist Joseph Campbell.  He was story consultant on some of Disney’s most successful animated films, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.  He went on to become a studio development executive at Fox 2000, a division of 20^th Century Fox, where he worked on Courage Under Fire, Anna and the King, Fight Club, and The Thin Red Line which was nominated for seven Academy Awards.  Currently he lectures around the world on story structure and development, and consults with the major Hollywood studios on their feature film projects.  He has written an animated feature, Jester Till, that is in production at Munich Animation Studios, and was executive producer of Steve Guttenberg’s film adaptation of P.S. Your Cat is Dead.

CONT. in Issue 2.

© Christopher Vogler 2002