On Improv for Screenwriters (or, finding the game in your scenes)
Greetings all — here’s the latest issue of Scripts and Pieces. Hope you’ve all had a good week and that you enjoy reading!
On Improv for Screenwriters (or finding the game in the scene)
Recently I’ve been getting interested in improv — which I realise ranks up there with the worst possible conversation starters. But I can’t help myself, I love the chaotic, vibrant nature of good improvised comedy, despite — and possibly a little bit because — it’s the diametric opposite to the controlled, fully thought-out narratives that I tend to write.
Recently, I’ve been reading a couple of books on the art: the UCB COMEDY IMPROVISATION HANDBOOK and Will Hines’s HOW TO BE THE GREATEST IMPROVISER ON EARTH and thinking about how some of the tools and techniques of improv can help us screenwriters when we’re writing our scenes.
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Usually, I’m very much a ‘structure’ guy: almost to a fault. And so a lot of my effort and focus goes on at a level high above scene work: how to make the script as a whole function as a story, how to develop a consistent argument across the piece, how to arc a character. All of which is — don’t get me wrong — important. But the danger with this approach is that scenes can start to become just brushstrokes in a greater picture instead of being loved and nurtured in their own right.
More recently, particularly with the feature script I’m working on at the moment, I’ve been thinking about how to give scene work more attention. And the greatest insight I’ve found from my reading on improv, is the importance of finding a scene’s game.
The premise at the heart of the UCB approach to improvisational comedy (which usually goes to some pretty surreal places) is that the scenes they play out should start as normally as possible. The audience should know who is playing the scene (who the characters are). The audience should know what the situation is (where they are, what they’re doing there), and it should be as everyday and mundane as possible. At the start of the scene, the improvisers shouldn’t be driving too hard to find the funny. You should simply seek to establish the scene and the world as they are.
Then as the scene continues, and the improvisers are figuratively passing the ball across the net, they suddenly discover between them the one thing that is different, heightened, unusual. This is what improvisers call “finding the game of the scene.” In his book, Will Hines explains it like this:
If you improvise a boxing manager who tells fighters to never throw punches, then the boxing match is the scene, and the manager’s insane advice is the game. The two fighters shake hands, someone rings a bell, the fighters dance to the center—that’s the scene. And then one drops his arms to his sides and lets himself get hit in the face, because that’s what his manager told him to do—that’s the game.
For us screenwriters who are in the midst of our screenplays, any scene we write will come with a set of presumptions and status quos. We need to establish for the audience where the scene takes place in space and time and at the particular moment in the relationship of the characters who are playing it.
Then, as the scene progresses, we find a moment when what the scene is about occurs. This — like “the game” in improv — is the thing that’s out of the ordinary, the thing that changes the world for the characters. Then, as they pursue the game, we will see a series of escalations and conflicts that relate to the game, until eventually, very soon before the scene ends, those conflicts are resolved in a new status quo, a status quo that you’ll then take to future scenes.
Something that I noticed when I write is that I sometimes want a scene to perform multiple functions, to have multiple layers. I might want to establish an attraction between two characters, while also foreshadowing a piece of plot, while also giving a sense of the wider society in which the story is taking place. The danger with attempting to knit together all these strands, is that a scene can stop having a game in and of itself. It becomes less than the sum of its parts. That — at least for me — is when a scene can fall flat.
By focussing on finding the game of the scene, you can draw your focus back onto the scene as a thing in and of itself, and your main task in writing the scene becomes servicing the game. You can layer after that, perhaps, but without distracting from the scene as the absolute unit of your screenplay.
On the Acquittal of the Colston Four
Despite myself, I’ve been following with great interest the trial of the Colston Four over the last few weeks. I say “despite myself” because there’s one part of my brain that insists that no matter how joyous and euphoric the day was last June when protestors toppled the statue of the seventeenth century slave trader and then — as an added indignity — dragged and dumped into the Brisol harbour, that much of the furore around it remains pretty symbolic. As with all symbols, the worry is that it might distract our attention from the real structural issues that it represents. Nevertheless, I’ve been drawn in — as much by the trial itself as the differing reactions it\s drawn and the stark divisions that it laid bare.
Then, last week, the Colston Four were acquitted and, barely hours after the decision was delivered, high ranking members of the Conservative Party — including the Attorney General who is supposed to stand up for the rule of law in the UK — have started chipping away at the verdict, suggesting the decision should be reviewed. From the point of view of a particular political persuasion, you might understand why. After all, the four people who were on trial didn’t deny going to Bristol with the express intent of pulling the statue down, one of them — a keen climber — brought rope with them exactly for that purpose. None of them disputed the damage they caused. In fact, they welcomed it. Looking at it with a purely logical legalistic mind, you might say that it’s remarkable that the jury came back with any other decision than guilty.
But that’s to ignore the long-standing facet of the British legal system, that a jury is under no compulsion, even given the evidence, to convict. In fact, in English law, they have an absolute right to acquit and — almost as if playing out an allegory of what the jury system is for, a committee of the accused peers, twelve people from the civic populous of Bristol, weighed in on a wider question that had a significant impact on their city. That the statue remained standing was abhorrent, and the act of punishing those who removed it could not be bourne.
On Taking Christmas Decorations Down
There’s always something a bit anticlimactic about taking down the Christmas decorations. By the time January 6th has come around (you couldn’t possibly consider taking them down sooner, of course) Christmas feels like nothing more than a distant memory. I’d sort of like the ritualistic de-arraying to be more of a clear and defined moment, the passing of a time of festivity and light back into stark mundanity. In fact, once you get to the stripping of the tinsel and the winding of Christmas lights, it is simply a chore to be completed as quickly as possible. For me, the sadness tends to come in a little slower, ebbing in when you least expect it, like when you walk into the room a few days later and note its emptiness.
This year we were guilted by some mutual acquaintances into buying a “live” Christmas tree (in its own pot) rather than your classic chopped-down pine. The pleasant result was that it stayed a luscious green throughout the festive period — instead of every day from New Year spent constantly sweeping brown pine droppings.
It does mean, however, that we are now faced with a question of what to do with a thing. Our friends told us magical tales of driving their tree into the woods near their house and replanting it back in its natural habitat. We live in the centre of Edinburgh with no car, however, and so a similar attempt at reforestation is out of the question.
We have our eye on an empty corner of our colony garden, though how it will fare with the passing traffic smog is anyone’s guess.
I’ve been reading… KLARA AND THE SUN
I’m a massive fan of Kazuo Ishiguro; there is something about his writing that seems so simple, so unguarded, but which has a level of complexity that completely belies what’s on the surface. This is perhaps why, while film adaptations of his books have done reasonably well (REMAINS OF THE DAY and NEVER LET ME GO being two prominent examples), they always fail to capture what’s truly interesting about his books. Klara and the Sun, his latest novel, is no different. The story of an Artificial Intelligence who is brought to a house to be a companion to a young girl is written as a first-person narrative and conveys the simplicity of a child: Klara, in keeping with her newness in the world, is optimistic and a touch naive.
The joy of reading the book is digging beneath this surface of what Klara sees and interprets of the world to find the real and emotionally fraught human and social relations that lie just out of her understanding. It’s a style that’s tense: you start to expect danger and disappointment for the narrator, but Ishiguro — always the master craftsman — pulls a powerful bait and switch with an upbeat, if bittersweet, ending, which underscores the redemptive power of love.
I’ve been visiting… HOWARDENA PINDELL: A NEW LANGUAGE @ The Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
We wandered down to the Fruitmarket Gallery in the shadow of Edinburgh station over the weekend to see A NEW LANGUAGE, the powerful and harrowing solo exhibition of Philadelphian artist Howardena Pindell’s work. It was a fascinating mix of direct and powerful assault on structural racism from the 70s to now (the most recent work shown was ROPE/FIRE/WATER from 2020, which ends with a list of the names of those who have been killed through police violence in the US) and an artistic attempt to reckon with the need to carry that burden as an artist.
In FREE, WHITE AND 21 Pindell mimics white artists and critics who question her work for not being political enough, her experience of racism “has got to be in your art in a way you consider valid”. My favourite works were the monumental, abstract canvasses (often formed of pasted paper chads scattered over the canvas and painted over), that were both suggestive and allusive, both making a forceful and principled stand while displaying an artistic practice that can’t be captured by any dogmatic stance.
As always, thanks for reading, and hope you have a great weekend!
All my best,
James.