Film Courage Plus: Creating Suspense

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me, around 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?



Creating suspense on screen:

Keeping the audience on the edge of their seat is the function of SUSPENSE. Suspense is not the same as action, nor is it the same as surprise, nor is it the same as mystery. Suspense is the *anticipation* of an action. The longer you draw out the anticipation, the greater the suspense. Hitchcock explained; "Two men are having an innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath the table between them. Nothing happens, then all of the sudden, BOOM! There is an explosion. The audience is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has been an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now let us take a SUSPENSE situation. The bomb is underneath the table, but the audience knows it... Probably because they have seen the villain place it there. The audience is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one O'clock, and there is a clock in the decor. It is a quarter to one. In this situation, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating, because the audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: 'There's a bomb beneath you, and it's about to explode!' In the first case, we have given the audience fifteen seconds of SURPRISE at the moment of the explosion. In the second case, we have provided them with fifteen MINUTES of SUSPENSE."

It’s no secret that I love thriller films and Hitchcock movies - my upcoming book is HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE which uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to illustrate different principles of suspense. But suspense isn’t confined to the thriller genre, it’s used in *every* genre to create tension. That romantic comedy where we know that one of the pair has that secret that will ruin the budding relationship if discovered... suspense is built around the anticipation of that discovery. In a movie of survival, be it THE MARTIAN or THE REVENANT suspense is built around situations where we anticipate the worst possible thing happening... and then the scene builds around that anticipation until it is resolved by the action. In REVENANT we know that bigoted fur trapper Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) plans on harming Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s son - and that scene builds tension until we get the action. Instead of the action being over in a flash, the audience has been given the information that it will happen and that makes us squirm in our seats as we see Fitzgerald’s plan unfolding. Instead of a couple of seconds of surprise we have a whole scene of tension and suspense. In dramas we often have suspense built around a secret that our protagonist doesn’t want discovered. Every genre uses suspense to build emotions before the action.

There are Four basic kinds of suspense: the "ticking clock" (or time lock) and "cross cutting" and “secrets” and “focus objects”. The Hitchcock example above is a ticking clock. We are given an event which will occur at a certain time, and our suspense builds as we get closer and closer to the time of the event. Cross Cutting takes two things we don’t want to see in the same place and gets them progressively closer to each other - like two trains hurtling towards each other on the same track. The closer they get to each other, the more suspense. A good example of this method is in Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW where our protagonist Jeffries sends his fiancé Lisa to search the apartment of suspected murdered Lars Thorwald. Jeffries has gotten Thorwald out of the apartment on the pretext of meeting him at a restaurant down the street, but when he doesn’t show Thorwald becomes impatient and returns home. Jeffries watches through the rear window of his apartment as Lisa searches the apartment as Thorwald returns - entering the building, climbing the stairs, walking down the hallway to his front door, unlocking the door, and...

Secrets are another form of suspense which is often used in dramas and comedies and romances. A character has a secret which they do not want to have discovered, and another character gets closer and closer to discovering it. In YOU’VE GOT MAIL we know the secret of Tom Hanks’ character - he’s the big corporate bookstore owner who is putting the small independent bookstore owned by Meg Ryan out of business... but the two meet and fall in love, and now he must keep that true identity secret from her because it will kill the relationship. The audience knows that secret exists, so we are in suspense that it will be discovered. Another type of secret suspense can be found in Hitchcock’s ROPE (an experimental film which we look at in my HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR book) - two men have murdered a friend and placed his body in a giant trunk in their livingroom... moments before having a party in that same livingroom in honor of the now dead friend. Everyone wonders where David is... but we know that he’s inside the trunk they are serving a buffet dinner from. Suspense builds as things happen which get some of the party guests looking closer at the trunk than the killers would like. Will their secret be discovered or will they get away with murder?

FOCUS OBJECTS

That trunk is what I call a “focus object”, and in the Film Courage clip I mention the middle ages sword and sex flick FLESH + BLOOD, where Princess Jennifer Jason Leigh has been kidnaped by Mercenary Rurger Hauer, and eventually becomes his mistress. Hauer is leader of a band of Mercenary soldiers - knights in rusted armor - who are raping and pillaging their way across Europe. They were double crossed by the evil Prince who Jennifer was engaged to, and now they are doing everything possible to make that Prince's life hell on earth. Eventually they capture the Prince, and chain him up near a well. Princess Jennifer, Hauer's mistress and the Prince's finace, is about to have a meal with all of the other mercenaries celebrating the capture of the Prince.

Before the other mercenaries reach the table, the Prince grabs a piece of plague infested meat from the trash and drops it in the well, poisoning the drinking water.

Jennifer sees this, and the question is - will she tell anyone? As the water is brought from the well to the table, tension builds. The water in the jug becomes the "focus object". Water is poured into glasses of several mercenaries who were not kind to her when she was kidnaped. She wants revenge against them, so she says nothing.

The Prince watches her, waiting for her to tell them that the water is poisoned. She sees the shackled Prince watching her, and she watches the mean mercenaries drink the poisoned water one-by-one.

That jug of poisoned water goes from mean mercenaries... to women and children. The poisoned water is poured into their glasses and they start to drink it... will Jennifer tell them it is poisoned? Suspense builds.

The Prince watches her, waiting for her to stop them from drinking. But both of them watch as the women and children drink the poisoned water.

Then the jug of poisoned water is passed to Rutger Hauer, her lover. He pours a glass of water. Will she let him drink it? She is torn between the man she was engaged to and the man she sleeps with every night. What will she do? Hauer is having a conversation with some of the others, and every time he grabs the glass to drink, someone says something and he responds instead of drinks. Suspense builds.

The Prince, shackled by the well smiles at her. What will she do?

As Hauer lifts the glass to his lips, she...

See how focus objects work? They create suspense by giving the protagonist and the audience the same secret information that is tied to an object... and then places that object where the secret can be discovered by characters who can not know that secret.

All of these techniques rely on *dramatic irony* - giving information to the audience that one or more characters do not have. The key is letting the audience know that the water is poisoned or that the body is in the trunk or that Tom Hanks is also that bastard with the big chain bookstore that is putting Meg Ryan out of business. If the audience is not given this information, there can be no suspense or tension... and the story is flat and dull. Our job as writers is to *lead the audience* - to use information to control what they think and feel. Hitchcock called it playing the audience like an instrument. By giving them specific story information at the perfect time we bring them inside the story - they know the secret that some other character does not and now they have a stake in the story. The audience wants that secret to remain a secret. The audience wants to warn the characters that there is a bomb under the table. The audience participates in the story and feels what the characters feel. Our job as writers is not just to tell the story, but to use techniques like suspense in order to tell that story well. To involve the reader and viewer so that it becomes their story as well.

Always be leading the audience. Always be in control of your story and when the information is given to the audience. What do you want them to know and when do you want them to know it? And *why* do you want them to know this information at this specific time in your tale?

- Bill

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

Click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 53 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

- Bill

Trailer Tuesday: BLACK CHRISTMAS

This week has a Friday The 13th...

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)




Directed by: Bob Clark.
Written by: Roy Moore.
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Andrea Martin.
Produced by: Findlay Quinn and Bob Clark.
Cinematography by: Reginald H. Morris (Oswald Morris’ brother).
Music by:Carl Zittrer .


Usually when we think of director Bob Clark and Christmas, we think of his classic film A CHRISTMAS STORY about that wacky family (that's much like yours and mine) and that kid's quest for a Red Ryder BB gun and his father’s quest for that unusual lamp... but I'm trying to avoid the obvious and find holiday films in unexpected genres. Films that may not be showing in the Network’s Holiday Films line up. Like Bob Clark's horror masterpiece BLACK CHRISTMAS - the original "We've traced the call... it's coming from INSIDE the house!" movie.



This film was originally titled SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT, but I saw it way back when on the bottom half of a horror double bill (might have been IT’S ALIVE) a couple of years after its initial release under the BLACK CHRISTMAS title. This is not just a fun holiday film, it’s an important film in horror history - the prototype for the 80s Slasher Film and the inspiration for John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) which began as a potential sequel to this film. It’s also packed with stars from that time period, and just like THE SILENT PARTNER there’s an SCTV star in a small role playing it straight. When I saw this film sometime in the mid-70s I was blown away - and parts of this movie still creep me out. That crank phone call at the beginning of SCREAM? This is where that idea came from...

The concept is great, a college sorority house at Christmas break as the girls leave to head home for the holidays one by one... but *are* they going home? Or are they being murdered by a maniac and stored up in the attic? This film turns the holiday break background into mystery and suspense. One of the great things about this film is the sense of humor and the look at the “generation gap” - both of these things carried by Margot Kidder before her big break as Lois Lane in SUPERMAN a couple of years later.

The movie opens with that scene from HALLOWEEN where we see the Killer’s POV outside the house as they look through the windows, enter the house to begin their killing spree - this time they climb through a window into the attic - which is filled with all kinds of junk covered in cobwebs. A spooky location that may seem like a cliche - but this film was one of the first...

DOWNSTAIRS the Pi Kappa Sigma Sorority Girls are preparing to leave for the Holidays. They are: sexually liberated and potty mouthed Barb (Margot Kidder) who lives to push everyone’s buttons, especially uptight conservative Claire Harrison (Lynn Griffin) who has lead a very sheltered life. Studious Phyllis (Andrea Martin) and our leading lady Jess (Olivia Hussey) try to get Barb to tone it down - but Barb has had too much to drink (as usual). Jess is the nice popular girl who has a steady boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea), and instead of going home for the holidays they have a ski vacation planned - this is a serious relationship. When Peter calls, she says she needs to talk to him in person... When the phone rings again, it’s a prank phone call on steroids - it starts with heavy breathing, then goes into weird crazy voices about Billy killing baby Agnes - screeching and laughing and then, “I’m going to kill you”.

Presiding over the sorority is House Mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) who is a drunk - and has a bottle hidden in every room of the house. There’s a great scene where she pulls a bottle out of the toilet tank, takes a long drink from it without even wiping it off, then replaces it. Lots of humor from where the next bottle will be hidden. Mrs. Mac’s cat is always getting lost in some spooky place in the house and she must go into the darkness to search for him.

Claire, angry at Barb for pushing her buttons, goes upstairs to pack - her Father is going to pick her up and take her home for the holidays tomorrow, As she’s packing, she finds the missing cat in the closet (hey - the first cat scare!) And then the clothes begin moving and - WHAM! - the killer from the attic pulls a clear garment bag over her head and asphyxiates her... then carries her up to the attic and puts her in an old rocking chair - looking out the window. This is scary and the asphyxiated Claire looking out the window through the plastic garment bag is effing creepy!

The next morning Claire’s Father (James Edmond) shows to pick her up... and she isn’t there. Claire’s Father is *very* conservative, and the sorority house is filled with sexy posters and pot posters and counter culture stuff... and in Claire’s bedroom is a picture of... a boy! Chris (Art Hindle) who is Claire’s townie boyfriend. This sends Claire’s Father over the edge - she is too young for a boyfriend! “I didn't send my daughter in here to be drinking and picking up the boys!”

They go to the police department to fill out a missing persons form, and we get one of the film’s great scenes of Barb vs. Authority Figure as she tells Desk Sgt Nash (Doug McGrath) when she gives him the sorority house phone number....

		SERGEANT NASH
	Excuse me? Could you give me the 
	number at the sorority house? Please?

		BARB 
	Yeah, sure. It's, ah... Fellatio 20880. 
	Fellatio. It's a new exchange, FE.

		SERGEANT NASH
	That's a new one on me. How do 
	you spell it?

		BARB 
	Capital F, E, little L, LA, TIO.

		SERGEANT NASH
	Thanks.

A couple of scenes later, Chief of Police Fuller (John Saxon) thinks that maybe they should take this missing person seriously when Chris shows up and says that Claire isn’t with him and there is no place where she could be... none of her friends have seen or heard from her. And she’s the conservative girl - she’s not out drinking or smoking pot or anything else. She’s *gone*.

Meanwhile, Jess is meeting with Peter, who is practicing for his big piano recital later that day. Peter is a *very* serious artist - and super emotional - anything will set him off... and Jess tells him that she’s pregnant. He wants her to keep the baby, she wants an abortion, and this relationship is in trouble. When Jess gets back to the Sorority House, the phone is ringing... the crank caller with even more weird voices and screeches and more about Billy killing baby Agnes. “Little baby bunting, Daddy's went a-hunting, Gonna fetch a rabbit skin, To wrap his baby Agnes in!” These calls scared the crap out of me first time I saw it (and still work) because they are just crazy.

The great thing about this film is the way the characters turn against each other when the killing starts - and it’s all character oriented. Barb feels guilty about ridiculing Claire for being such a goody two shoes and fears that she is responsible for Claire running away. When Peter blows his recital and takes it out on Jess, she begins to think that her boyfriend is a psycho. The Sorority House becomes a crucible - and all of the characters turn against each other in the foreground, as other characters go missing and the crank calls continue. Adding to all of this is a missing 13 year old girl and the fears that Claire vanishing might be related. A great moment when Claire’s Father is at the police station when Jess calls about the obscene phone calls, and puts two and two together - the missing 13 year old girl and his missing daughter... and the obscene calls. There’s a great search of the park at night where the Sorority Girls help to look for the little girl, fearing that they may find Claire... and they find the little girl brutally murdered. And Mrs Mac finds her missing cat... eating Claire’s face in the attic! After that, Mrs. Mac goes missing... and the bodies continue to pile up in the attic! Like John Carpenter's THE THING, this film gets much of its mileage by having the characters suspect each other; and also gives us a logical possibility that no one has been murdered... and maybe it's all in Jess’s head. It’s a clever screenplay that always keeps you guessing - and makes you wonder which character is the killer.

This film also has a couple of amazing "you can't do that in a movie" twists, including one where we are *sure* we know who the killer is... and are then proven wrong only *after* that character has been killed. Hey, that's kind of like THE THING, too!

But the main thing about BLACK CHRISTMAS is that it's spooky and probably the first "kill a bunch of people in a house" movie. Okay, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was released the same year, so it may have technically been the second movie with that basic plot - but BLACK CHRISTMAS is the version of that basic plot that you can trace through HALLOWEEN to SCREAM. In fact, HALLOWEEN began as a sequel to BLACK CHRISTMAS...

John Carpenter was a huge fan on the film and talked to Bob Clark about making a sequel at one point in time. BLACK CHRISTMAS was inspired by the urban legend of the babysitter who gets a phone call from a crazy person about checking on the babies... and when the babysitter goes in to check on the children, the kids are gone and she is killed by the lunatic on the phone. Those elements are still in BLACK CHRISTMAS even though it’s been transposed onto the sorority house of a college campus... but Carpenter wanted to go back to the roots and make a film called THE BABYSITTER MURDERS... which was the original title of HALLOWEEN. He wanted to have the killer from BLACK CHRISTMAS caught and put in a mental institution, and then escape and go back to the town to kill babysitters. Because the idea was completely different than BLACK CHRISTMAS, Clark thought it didn’t need to be a sequel (and all of the rights issues required) and Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote it as an original and the rest is history. Though there are similarities between the two films, they are very different as well - instead of a random crazy killer, HALLOWEEN has Michael Myers as a little boy who kills his sister, then is institutionalized... and escapes years later as an adult. There are no calls coming from inside the house - Michael Myers isn’t at all chatty. So Carpenter made his own movie, but would that movie have existed without BLACK CHRISTMAS?

		SERGEANT NASH
	Who is this?

		JESS
	It's Jess.

		SERGEANT NASH
	Ms. Bradford, this is Sergeant Nash. 
	Are you the only one in the house?

		JESS
	No. Phyll and Barb are upstairs asleep. 
	Why?

		SERGEANT NASH
	Alright. Now I want do you exactly what 
	I tell you without asking any questions, 
	okay?

		JESS
	Wh...

		SERGEANT BRADFORD
	No, no, no... no questions. Now just put 
	the phone back on the hook, walk to the 
	front door and leave the house.

		JESS
	What's wrong?

		SERGEANT NASH
	Please, Ms. Bradford, please just do as I 
	tell you.

		JESS
	Okay. I'll get Phyll and Barb.

		SERGEANT NASH
	No, no, no, don't do that Jess.
			(beat)
	Jess, the caller is in the house. 
	The calls are coming from the house!

Plus BLACK CHRISTMAS is a great holiday film, since Christmas is going on in the background. A disturbing double bill with Bob Clark's CHRISTMAS STORY... something to warm your heart, then cut it out with a rusty knife!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

HITCH 20: REVENGE (s1e1)

There's a great new documentary series called HITCH 20 that I have been a "guest expert" on, and the new season begins in a couple of months. So here is the very first episode - the "pilot" - which is without me:

This episode is REVENGE, and the story is a corker: a man's wife is brutally raped and he extracts his revenge when she recognizes the attacker on the street. I actually prefer the remake done in the 1980s, due to casting: Where Ralph Meeker (who played Mike Hammer) seems like the kind of guy who would have no problem extracting revenge, the remake had David Clennon (who always plays geeks with triple chins) who has a great deal of trouble with the physical aspects of revenge... making it even more gut wrenching.

Of course, I have my own books focusing on Hitchcock...

HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE

LEARN SUSPENSE FROM THE MASTER!

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 52 movies, was known as the “Master Of Suspense”; but what exactly is suspense and how can *we* master it? How does suspense work? How can *we* create “Hitchcockian” suspense scenes in our screenplays, novels, stories and films?

This book uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to show the difference between suspense and surprise, how to use “focus objects” to create suspense, the 20 iconic suspense scenes and situations, how plot twists work, using secrets for suspense, how to use Dread (the cousin of suspense) in horror stories, and dozens of other amazing storytelling lessons. From classics like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Birds” and “Vertigo” and “To Catch A Thief” to older films from the British period like “The 39 Steps” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to his hits from the silent era like “The Lodger” (about Jack The Ripper), we’ll look at all of the techniques to create suspense!

Films Included: NOTORIOUS, SABOTAGE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, FRENZY, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THE LODGER, THE BIRDS, TORN CURTAIN, SABOTEUR, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1955), SUSPICION, and NUMBER SEVENTEEN. 17 Great Films!

Only 125,000 words!

Price: $5.99

Click here for more info!

OTHER COUNTRIES:


UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

And....

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

USA Readers click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 52 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

THRILLER Thursday: The Last Of The Sommervilles

SEASON 2!!!



The spider web fills the screen, it's Boris Karloff's THRILLER!

Season: 2, Episode: 7.
Airdate: Nov. 6, 1961

Director: Ida Lupino.
Writer: Ida Lupino & R.M.H. Lupino (her cousin).
Cast: Peter Walker, Phyllis Thaxter.
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cinematography: John F. Warren.
Producer: William Frye.

Boris Karloff’s Introduction: “And how does your garden grow? Sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this one will flourish. Of courser it’s only proper there be to mark the final resting place of someone so unceremoniously interred. But then, of course, Ursula Sommerville has very little respect for the dear departed... Particularly since it happens to be a member of the family. Our story tonight concerns her slowly dwindling clan, as well as her sinister determination to become the last of the Sommervilles, which by the way is the title of our play. Our leading players are: Phyliss Thaxter, Martita Hunt, Peter Walker, and this odd looking chap is Doctor Farnham. You know I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen that face before somewhere. Well, come - be my guests won’t you, as we resume our little garden party.”

Synopsis: On a foggy night at the Sommerville Mansion, a cloaked figure drags a dead body across the grounds to a hole and buries it, shoveling dirt over the corpse, then arranging ivy and flowers over the grave. Afterwards the figure pulls off her hood, exposing that this fiend is a woman! Ursula Sommerville (Phyliss Thaxter)... who smiles when she’s finished.

The prodigal nephew Rutherford (Peter Walker) returns to the mansion on a dark and windy night, rings the bell. Ursula answers the door - they have never met, and he assumes that she’s a servant. She tells him that his aunt has been expecting him, and sends him upstairs.

Aunt Celia (Martita Hunt) is a giddy old biddy who loves her nephew, and wonders why he hasn’t visited in the past 15 years. She invested in his African gold mine and some other ventures, and now he’s got a business venture in Paris, but he has this little problem - he needs some money. Celia says they can talk about that later, because tonight is the big party and she needs to bath and change. By the way, Aunt Sophie will be attending. Celia asks “her maid” Ursula where Sophie has been hiding herself, and Ursula reminds her that she left for Europe.

While Aunt Celia bathes, Rutherford flirts with “the maid” Ursula... until he discovers that she’s his cousin, four times removed by marriage. But that just slows him down. She tells him where the liquor is kept, and he leaves.

Later Ursula sees Rutherford passed out in the livingroom, grabs the fire poker and... pokes the fire after a moment where she seems to contemplate braining him. When Rutherford wakes up they have a conversation about Aunt Celia’s health - and her little heart seizures. Both seem to be scheming. Ursula informs him that there is no party, except in Aunt Celia’s imagination. “Nothing wrong with her being a little eccentric as long as it doesn’t interfere with her writing checks.”

A week later, and Aunt Celia has still not loaned Rutherford the money he needs for Paris. Ursula keeps talking her out of it after he talks her into it. Rutherford is becoming desperate, and is ready to leave... when Ursula offers him a deal. She has managed to become the sole financial beneficiary of Aunt Celia’s will, all the remaining living family members - Aunt Sofie and Rutherford - get some baubles. But if Rutherford helps Aunt Celia die, Ursula will pay him a large chunk of money - twenty times what he’s asked Aunt Celia for. “Murderers are often hanged.” “So are stockings.” As sole beneficiary, Ursula needs an airtight alibi for the time of Aunt Celia’s death... but Rutherford won’t inherit a cent so he has no real motive. The police will not suspect him in Celia has an “accident”.

The night of the “accident” Aunt Celia has thrown a monkey wrench into the plan by inviting her doctor to dinner. But is he really coming to dinner or is this just another one of Aunt Celia’s fantasies? Ursula and Rutherford change the plan, so that Dr. Farnum (Boris Karloff) will be a witness. Of course, Dr. Farnum has an interest in marrying Aunt Celia so that *he* can inherit. Rutherford is supposedly in town playing cards and drinking with friends, and after dinner Ursula needs to go into town for a charity auction... and Dr. Farnum offers to take her in his carriage (becoming her alibi witness).

When Dr. Farnum and Ursula leave, and Aunt Celia goes upstairs to have her bath; Rutherford sneaks out of the basement.

The murder plan involves Aunt Celia taking her nightly bath, and a live electrical wire in her sponge. When she uses the sponge, she will be electrocuted, then Rutherford removes the live wire and cleans us and it appears as if she has died from one of those heart seizures. There’s some nice suspense in this scene when Aunt Celia keeps *almost* grabbing the sponge, then grabbing something else instead... there’s a tray of chocolates next to the sponge, some bath oils, etc. She finally grabs the sponge, screams, and...

The funeral at the Sommerville crypt. Afterwards Aunt Celia’s lawyer Mr. Parchester (Chet Stratton) asks if they can read the will a week from Friday. When the lawyer leaves, Rutherford is angry - he’ll have to wait almost two weeks before he can get his money.

Someone begins sending them anonymous notes accusing them of murder... Who could know? Ursula accuses Rutherford of getting drunk in town and letting something slip. Rutherford wonders if Dr, Farnham is behind the notes... and maybe Ursula let something slip. Hmm, maybe the doctor could become victim to an accident? When Rutherford worries about two murders, Ursula corrects him - Three - she killed Aunt Sophie and got away with it. Everyone thinks Sophie is in Europe.

Dr. Farnham stops by unexpectedly, and Rutherford tells him that Ursula is in town. Farnham mentions that a storm is coming, would be a shame if she was caught up in it. Farnham wonders if they’ve told Aunt Sophie, Celia’s sister, about her death? Rutherford says she’s traveling in Europe and they have no idea how to reach her. Farnham keeps hinting around that Sophie’s vacation seems unusual. Everything he says is perfectly innocent... but a veiled threat. He knows.

That foggy night, Ursula - in the hooded cloak - wakes Rutherford and tells him that someone is out on the edge of the estate watching the house. They look out the window and there *is* a figure in the fog. It must be Dr. Farnham. Ursula gives Rutherford a gun and says, “In case there’s a prowler on the grounds”.

Rutherford and Ursula sneak through the fog to attack the prowler... but she leads him into the bog, where he slowly sinks! He aims the gun at her and fires - empty! She watches him die, smiling. Then collects the coat on the branch that was the figure they saw from the window.

The reading of the will: Ursula gets the mansion and everything else (except the small things to the other (now dead) family members. But... to keep the family name alive, she will not be able to collect any of this until she marries her cousin four times removed, Rutherford, and bares a male child. If that is not possible, the entire fortune will be left to her lawyer Mr. Parchester who will be in charge of charitable donations...

Ursula is screwed! She inherits *nothing*!

Until the twist...

Ursula and Parchester were behind this from the very beginning! They’re a couple!

Years later, the mansion is for sale... because Ursula and Parchester died in a car accident.
(you can get away with murder in real life, but not on network TV - Standards & Practices forbids it!)

Review: This is probably the weakest of Ida Lupino’s episodes, but when you compare it to most of the other episodes it’s still probably in the top third as far as quality is concerned. Though all of these episodes were probably shot in a week, and many look as if they were thrown together at the last minute; most of Lupino’s episodes are filled with amazing imaginative shots and camera moves - using the same revolving bunch of cinematographers that the other episodes used. So it’s obvious that the difference between the blandly shot episodes and the amazingly shot episodes is the person calling the shots - director Lupino.

Even though here we get more standard shots that in her other episodes, we still get lots of creativity you don’t see in many of the episodes directed by others. At the beginning of the episode there’s a great point of view shot as Rutherford’s hand grabs the gate handle and pushes it open, then we dolly in maintaining the POV shot until Rutherford steps into frame and we continue with an over-the-shoulder top the front door.

And there’s a great moving camera shot as Rutherford checks himself in a mirror (no camera or crew reflection) and then enters his aunt’s room - all one shot.

Later there’s a nice German Expressionist shot as Rutherford’s *shadow* climbs the stairs - reflected on the wall - until Rutherford reaches the top of the stairs and steps into frame.

And several other nice mirror shots - enough great visual stuff to put this in that top third. The main thing that holds it back is the story itself, which is fairly pedestrian without much suspense or many plot twists. So Lupino does as much as she can with a story told in a fairly bland manner about people killing each other over an inheritance. Plot 53 B.

The only one to blame for the bland story blandly told is... Lupino and her cousin who wrote the script! She usually wrote with her husband Collier Young (even after they were divorced) so maybe he was her other half creatively as well, and her cousin was not. This isn't a bad episode, it's just not her best. Next week another new Season 2 entry... A mystery with not much in the way of thrills.

- Bill

Film Courage Plus: Big Screens Need Big Ideas

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me, around 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?

It's a big screen, you need ideas big enough to fill it!



You say you have an idea for a movie... but do you? Maybe you have an idea for a TV show or a novel or a short story or a mini-series or a stage play or a ... How can you be sure that your idea is a *movie*?

In the clip I talk about the problem with many of my early screenplays - they were too small for the big screen. The story ideas would have been better suited to TV. Even though longform cable shows like GAME OF THRONES might make this theory a little confusing, for the most part the size of the average screen reflects the size of the idea necessary to fill that screen. So when you are coming up with ideas for movies - the big screen - you need larger than life ideas. That average FBI profiler chases serial killer idea is fine for a smaller screen, but you need something with a larger scope to make it big enough for the big screen.

"Look, there’s no question that we are heading toward a future where event films are only going to become more event-sized. You’ve got so many options in your home for viewing content that there has to be a need for you to leave your home, and what is going to drive you to do that?" Joe Russo - AVENGERS ENDGAME.

A movie is seen on a big screen by hundreds of thousands of people around the world at the same time (more or less). You sit in a crowded cinema to see a movie, so it is not a small intimate story. You are sharing it with 300 people when you see it. The story needs *scope* (not the mouth wash, the spectacle) - as I say in the clip, people have to spend a small fortune to go to the cinema these days, it needs to be an *event* in order to get them to leave their homes and drive and park and spend all of that money. Just a regular story is going to be a tough sell to the producer and a tough sell to the audience.

I know that many of you are mentally coming up with a list of movies that prove me wrong, and that’s fine... but the business is changing as I write this. The middle has fallen out and medium budget films are failing at the box office. There was an article a while back in Variety about movies like LONG SHOT that have two stars, a great funny story, and even though it deals with a Presidential race... the story was too small to attract the kind of audience it needed to make back it’s money. Low budget films can still work because they don’t have to make as much money to recoup their costs, but everything else needs to be a big enough event to get a mass audience. The middle movies end up being “we’ll wait for Netflix” - which seems to be where those mid-range romantic comedies are being made these days. So the bigger the screen, the bigger the idea needs to be...

Yeah, you have a wall sized TV and comfy cinema seats with built in cup holders at home... but the average person is watching a 32" TV set in their livingroom. They watch those kind of small, intimate, personal stories that fit that screen size. Cop shows and comedies and other things about real people - rather than larger than life characters. Of course, even TV has shows about witches and aliens and zombies - because even on a small screen people want to watch escapist stories. But in a cinema? Larger than life stories are expected. So is your idea big enough to fill the screen?

COMING UP WITH BIG IDEAS
When I had my day job working in the warehouse for a decade, I wrote a good page a day - and that's 3 scripts a year for a grand total of 30 scripts. One of my current spare time projects (like I have spare time) is to rewrite all of these old scripts and make the ideas big enough to fit the screen. One that I finished rewriting a few years ago was about a bodyguard and a woman pregnant with the President's kid - and the President's people want her dead so that he can be re-elected. THE BODYGUARD meets what's in Bill Clinton's pants. This was pre-Clinton though, and was kind of a JFK-like Prez and a Marilyn Monroe type. There always seemed to be some movie with a similar idea, just as I prepared to send it out. First we had THE BODYGUARD, then we had all of those Clinton scandal movies like ABSOLUTE POWER and MURDER AT 1600 where the President is having an affair and kills the girl himself. Not exactly my script, but kind of the same idea. Just when those had run their course we got a half dozen Bodyguard-Protects-Pregnant-Babe movies, at least two or three of which starred Clive Owen. My script needed something that really made it different! That made it big enough for the screen.

One of those Clive Owen movies had the *only pregnant woman in the world* - after babies just stopped being born. That’s a big idea! I wrote my script back when I didn't understand that high concept isn't just doing search and replace to make it The President or make the bad guys into Vampires or have the story take place In Outer Space. I had a weak concept - one that was obvious instead of inventive. The more unique your concept is, the less likely someone else will come up with it and the more likely it will be something personal.

What I needed was *more* imagination to make it more unique (and more personal) (and bigger in scope).

So, what I needed to do was give this old script a high concept injection that would change the core of the story. To take the basic plotting and characters and overlay a new high concept. Add a new weird element. Make it a bigger story. The bodyguard protecting the pregnant babe is still there - but instead of her pregnant with the President's kid, I raised the stakes and changed the genre by having the father be someone even more powerful. So the story is *now* about the Vatican's version of Indiana Jones who unearths the key to cracking a code in the missing Dead Sea Scroll... and discovers that the second coming is about to take place - the Second Son will be born in a certain hospital on September 29th... So the archeologist jets to the hospital to find and protect the pregnant woman from Satan's minions - who want to kill her before she gives birth. Various forms of demons attack (instead of The President's handler's secret hit squad) and each form of demon is some cool kind of monster. I tried to make the demons all kind of high concept. Coming up with them was fun. And the new end twist - she gives birth, and it's *Satan's* son! Okay - kinda RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK meets THE BODYGUARD meets DAVINCI CODE meets CONSTANTINE meets THE OMEN... but much better than the stale script it began life as... and it examines faith and responsibility, a couple of things I've been thinking about lately. I'm hoping they hire Clive Owen as the lead.

TWO TOOLS FOR SISTER SARA

Here are two basic tools for making your idea bigger - MAGNIFICATION and SUBSTITUTION. The above is an example of substitution - I rewrote a script with a small idea about assassins trying to kill a woman because she is pregnant with the President’s child, and substituted God or Satan as the father. That only changes everything. Basically substitution is a “high concept injection” - you can take a small or smallish story and substitute a larger or more cinematic conflict. I really like 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE - which is the story of a woman who gets into a car accident and wakes up in a stranger’s house... and the stranger is pretty damned strange. Does that sound like MISERY? A man gets intro a car accident and wakes up in a stranger’s house? Same basic story concept. MISERY is about a novelist who wakes up in his Number One Fan’s house - and she wants him to write a new novel just for her... or else. A snow storm keeps him trapped in the house, until... In 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE it isn’t a snow storm, it’s an alien invasion. Substitution. The weirdo doesn’t want her to write a novel, but she may be needed to help him propagate the human race. Eeew!

The great thing about 10 CLOVERDFIELD is they use the alien invasion as a mystery element - she doesn’t believe it happened and thinks this old guy is just a pervert... until she sees what is going on outside the bunker. Substitution is kind of a cosmetic change - though you still have to do a page one rewrite to turn a story like MISERY into a story like 10 CLOVERFIELD, the story conflict remains about someone being held captive inside a building and the cat and mouse relationship between them. The snow storm or alien invasion is the background.

MAGNIFICATION is going to change the story conflict itself. Make the conflict larger. This is a tool that can be used to find your “doorway” into a story - so you probably don’t know what it feels like to be wrongly accused of murder and going on the run from the police... so how can you write about that authentically? How can you get into that character? But you probably have been wrongly accused of doing something at work - stealing Milton’s red stapler or maybe someone’s lunch or maybe screwing up when really it was someone else who screwed up. And you have had to hide from Milton (or whoever’s lunch went missing) for part of the day - avoiding them in hallways. So you can magnify those authentic emotions - blow them way out of proportion - to understand how it feels to be wrongly accused of murder and write something like THE FUGITIVE.

But you can use Magnification not only to understand how the wrongly accused character feels in THE FUGITIVE, but to magnify the problem in a smaller story idea until it is big enough to fill a cinema screen. To take a core conflict like being wrongly accused and magnifying it into something much bigger... and maybe high concept. In SALT Angelina Jolie's character is accused of being a deep cover Russian spy - working in the CIA! So now we have a big spy thriller with all kinds of action scenes filling the screen. But can we make it bigger? There's an old British science fiction movie, THE CREEPING UNKNOWN about an astronaut who returns from space... different. He is slowly becoming an alien. That story is told from the government's point of view as they chase and try to capture him, but let's Switch It to the astronaut's point of view...

(Switching It is another great idea tool - in the Idea Machine Blue Book I have an idea about an actor up for a role as a hit man who pretends to be a hit man in a mob bar... and accidentally takes a job killing someone. And the mobster will kill him if he doesn't!
Then I Switch It to a mobster accidentally taking a job as an actor. A casting agent looking for "authentic bit part actors" goes into the same mob bar and meets this entertaining guy who has the look and attitude of a mobster, and casts him in a small role with only two lines. Except this guy is *great*! So they write a larger part for him... not knowing that he's actually a mob hit man. Well, when the Oscar nominations come out, he is one of the 5 up for Best Supporting Actor! And he has a unique way of dealing with competition! Okay, that's your mini lesson on coming up with ideas by Switching It)

So our protagonist is an Astronaut who comes back from outer space... different. He feels a little strange. And while in quarantine he notices strange scales growing on his chest - like a lizard! He tries to keep the medical team from noticing it, because he wants to go home to his wife and kids rather than be stuck even longer in quarantine. Maybe it's just a rash? But the scales begin to spread, and he escapes from the NASA quarantine facility and goes on the run... accused of being an alien invader. And now our idea is even bigger that SALT's deep cover Russian agent! And our Astronaut hero who just wants to get back to his family, finds himself doing things against his will - breaking into military installations to find out about any secret defenses we might have in place in case of alien invasion.

Okay, is that still THE FUGITIVE or borrowing Milton's stapler at work and forgetting to give it back?

We have MAGNIFIED the conflict and now it's much bigger than the small story idea we started with. The great thing about Magnification and Substitution is that the emotional story remains intact. Though Richard Kimble in THE FUGITIVE wanted to prove that he was innocent of murdering his wife, our astronaut story has a man who wants to prove he's innocent and also just wants to return to his family again. Question: What do you think his wife's response will be when she sees his lizard skin? His kid's response to his lizard skin? See how we are not sacrificing emotional scenes once we make the story bigger?

I actually used both MAGNIFICATION and SUBSTITUTION in my Bodyguard script rewrite - magnifying the importance of the child that the woman was pregnant with. Once you magnify it from the President's illegitimate child to the Second Coming, that changes absolutely every word in the screenplay... Which is why it's better to *start* with the big idea... Like Joe Russo says in the quote.

You can do the same thing with a small idea - use magnification to blow the conflict out of proportion so a small conflict is now a huge conflict. Big enough to fill the screen.

ACTIVE LIFESTYLES
In one of my Script Tips in rotation I look at one of the keys to an *indie* drama - give the protagonist an “active lifestyle”. BREAKING AWAY is one of my favorite films, about four blue collar kids about to graduate high school and wondering what comes next. A typical coming of age film. So what makes it a *movie*? What gives this story “scope”? Well, our protagonist is a cyclist and there is a world championship bike race in the city nearby - and he can race against the professionals! Now we have a protagonist who competes in a visually exciting sport, and a race that has cyclists from around the world - it’s a world event, not a small town event. In THE WRESTLER we have a story about where Mickey Rourke plays an old has been who is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter... but he’s an ex-wrestler (active lifestyle) who wants to prove his worth by climbing in the ring again. Now we have something visual and interesting. More cinematic.

So think about changing the character's *occupation* to something more interesting and exciting. Does The Vatican have a version of Indiana Jones looking for lost religious artifacts?

You always want to come up with story ideas that are big enough to fill the screen, but also personal - so that you can write authentic emotions and not go crazy writing draft #27 because you have a connection to the story.

A year ago I had a project where I needed to come up with a bunch of pitches for sequels to movies in a studio's library. After selecting some movies, my next step was to let my imagination run wild and find interesting and unusual story ideas for a sequel - to take the unique idea from the original and add another unique idea. More high concept injection. While doing this, I looked for stories that were personal to me - things the protagonist could wrestle with that were things that I have wrestled with. Some of the ideas I came up with are really cool - personal and completely wild... and large enough to fill the big screen. One of my ideas was to add Parallel Universes to an existing science fiction film in the vault. Another was a horror movie where I magnified the stakes and turned it into a crazy supernatural disaster movie. I *added* another high concept to whatever was in the original film! Part of the reason for that was in case this deal fell through, my second high concept made the story so original that few people would even know that the story began as a sequel to an existing movie. I added a concept that changed everything so that it was a completely different story.

Having a Big Idea at the core of your screenplay is important once you boil it all down to a logline, because the logline is all about the concept. If it's a small, unimaginative concept that is probably an automatic "no". Like it or not, movies are an *event* and need to have big ideas. This is one of the reasons why I like to come up with the logline before writing the screenplay - it insures that I have that big idea at the core. Hey, most of my movies were for independent Production Companies making movies for cable networks, and *they* didn't want a standard action script if they could get one with a high concept!

So, if you use your imagination and stay away from small stories, which puts your script in a good stack - there may be another script in there that has the same idea as yours, but there aren't hundreds of them. Then, if you make it personal, you have a script that may have the same idea as another script, but is still a *unique* take on that idea. And we get ARMAGEDDON and DEEP IMPACT. And if there is still a script in the stack that has the same general idea as yours, find all of the ways that your idea is different and do a major rewrite focusing on those elements... and if that doesn't do it, twist the concept even more and do a page one rewrite. If someone just sold a script with a similar idea as yours - just make yours different. And make sure that your story is big enough to fill the screen!

Good luck and keep writing!

More on this in the Idea Machine Blue Book!

- Bill

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Thank you to everyone!

- Bill

Trailer Tuesday: BAD SANTA

Holiday Season is officially upon us!

BAD SANTA (2003)

Director: Terry Zwigoff
Writers: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Bernie Mac.

Glenn Ficarra & John Requa's BAD SANTA is about a foul mouthed, alcoholic, angry department store Santa played to perfection by Billy Bob Thornton. He's not a nice guy, not looking for redemption, and not someone we'd ever want to hang out with in real life... but for ninety minutes in a cinema he's a whole lot of (mean spirited) fun. Here are a few of the reasons we may not like Billy Bob's character, but we can't tear ourselves away from watching him.



1) He's a rogue and a rebel. After a few days of crowded malls, listening to the same Christmas music over-and-over again, we may want to say "bah humbug!" to the whole Christmas experience... but that would be wrong. So we try to be cheerful and happy. Billy Bob does what we wish we could do - he rebels against everything cheerful and commercial about the Christmas season. He's fed up with the holiday season, and not afraid to show it. We may fantasize about knocking people out of the way at the mall, he *does it*. We secretly like people who break the rules and rebel against society - and what's a bigger symbol of society than Christmas?

2) We understand his bad behavior. He hates his job as a department store Santa, and we'd hate it, too. Kids sneeze all over him, wet their pants on his lap, demand toys, seem to speak in a foreign language (the kids ask for toys that he's never heard of - but expect him to know exactly what they're talking about), the kids (and parents) feel like they own him - he can't even eat his lunch in peace! If people kept bugging me on my lunch hour I'd probably get mad, too. He deals with the most crass and commercial aspects of Christmas, it's no wonder he's a Bah Humbugger.

3) We understand his character. BAD SANTA opens with Billy Bob sitting in a bar telling us about his abusive father - this is a guy who has never known love. Even his parents treated him badly. He's spent his entire life being abused, and now he's a bitter drunk. That may not be someone we identify with, but we can see how he became this angry guy. We're taken inside his miserable life. He's a guy with a chip on his shoulder, but the film explains where that chip came from. When his father died Billy Bob was left nothing except a basic knowledge of safe-cracking... which explains his current career. He doesn't want to be a department store Santa, it's just part of the department store robbery scheme. The key to writing a script with an unlikable character is making sure that we understand the character.

4) Someone to love. At first the snot-nosed Kid (Brett Kelly) is a nuisance - hanging around him, overly cheerful, a happy stalker. Then the Kid is an accidental helper - fighting off the crazed Gay rapist in the parking lot and providing Billy Bob with a place to hide out. But eventually a bond grows between the two - Billy Bob helps the Kid deal with the skateboard bullies and deal with his self esteem issues. He sees himself in the Kid - both have gotten the short end of the stick from society and are filled with self-loathing. By helping the kid, he's really helping himself. He's kind to the Kid, cares about the Kid, and we're able to see a softer side of his character.

And because the Kid worships him, we really hope he gets his act together... and we end up caring about him. The same goes for the cocktail waitress (Lauren Graham) he shacks up with. She may just be interested in him because of that weird Santa fetish, but she likes him. By giving him relationships with others, we have a chance to see him through their eyes.




5) Goal & Obstacle. Give any character a goal that requires struggle and we'll wonder if they can achieve that goal. Here the goal is to do a very bad thing - rob the department store on Christmas Eve. But a goal is a goal, and the obstacles are many. First we have the torture of being a department store Santa before the robbery, then we have his verbally abusive partner (Tony Cox) and his mercenary wife (Lauren Tom), then we have the *very* straight-laced Personnel Director (the late John Ritter), and the dangerous Head of Security for the department store (Bernie Mac).

6) Humor. You can have the most unlikeable character in the world, but if they're funny we'll hang around them for a couple of hours. This guy is sarcastic, but he's also funny because his behavior is completely inappropriate. He's the opposite of everything we expect in a Christmas movie. Whether he's screwing plus-sized women in the changing rooms or drinking on duty, he does those things we never expected a guy in a Santa suit to ever do on screen. When he comes up the escalator passed out, you can't help but laugh. His explanation for why he's wearing a fake beard is outrageously funny, and becomes a running gag throughout the film (the Kid walks in on Santa having sex with the Cocktail Waitress later in the film and calls her "Mrs. Claus' sister"). He's got a cynical (and funny) response to every situation.

Bill