A lot of fans don't like Frank Capra, the director of films like "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "It's a Wonderful Life." I guess he's too sentimental for some people. That's a pity. His best films always feel directed and they always feel written, and that's no small achievement.A lot of the credit goes to his long-time collaborator, writer Robert Riskin. I just saw "Mr. Deeds" and I have a copy of the screenplay in front of me so I thought I'd pick a couple of pages and talk about what I like about them.
Synopsis of the sequence: Mr. deeds takes his girl to a restaurant where a bunch of writers make fun of him for being a greeting card poet. When he realizes what they're up to he stands up and gets mad.
Let me digress for a moment because the context of these pages is important. Immediately before the restaurant sequence people in a cramped, crowded car driving in the rain were frantically yelling, "Hurry! Hurry!" Capra fades to the dry and spacious restaurant interior where dreamy, romantic music is playing and the camera tracks past busy waiters and customers to Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur.The sequence is wonderful already, and nobody's even said anything yet!
I forgot to say that the restaurant is neat, beautiful and civilized but not gaudy. The film celebrates civilization. Capra (as he always does) fills the scene with a kazillion extras and the gypsy violin music is to die for. What a contrast to the frenzied shouts in the last sequence!
The cuts are incredible! The shots are clipped and have an avant-garde feeling but the gypsy violin and the friendly faces of the stars soothes over the drastic cuts and we hardly notice them.
So what does all this have to do with Riskin's script? Everything! The script allows the visuals and the ambient sound to carry the beginning of the sequence!!!! Nobody says, "Isn't this a beautiful restaurant?" The waiters don't talk to each other. The script knows how to be quiet! It's a cinematic script!
There's some terrific dialogue between Cooper and Arthur, and that part has it's own build and climax, then the wicked, big-city writers invite the couple over to their table.
The writers speak fast and furious and each taunts Deeds with his own style of speaking. The word music is incredible! Imagine that! The writer wrote this section with word music in mind! When has an animation writer ever done that? This whole part of the script is a set-piece to show off the sound of the human voice!
OK ,that takes us to the beginning of the script that I reproduced below.
Mr. Deeds gets mad and the word music shifts to oratory as he scolds. I love oratory! I read a how-to book that advised writers to avoid it...bad advice! Audiences love to hear the roar of the aroused (the right word?) lion!
Deeds punches everybody out and one of the writers apologizes and offers to take him and his date out on the town. This doesn't exactly move the story forward but the dialogue is beautifully written and the actor that delivered it did a tour de force job. He was able to do such a good job because the writer had the courage to write a literate and complex piece of word music for him.
I also call your attention to the fact that Riskin gave this beautiful performance piece to a non-essential actor who we hardly see again in the film. Animation story editors would delete set pieces like this without hesitation which is why the Deity will no doubt send them all to Hell someday. Screen writing is more akin to opera than to straight narrative, as Riskin rightly perceives.
24 comments:
Sorry for the weird paragraph spacing. Blogger's being difficult again.
Forget the paragraph spacing, Eddie, you can't enlarge the script pages. Check those links!
Wieee! Big Capra fan here :-D.
Capra explains his reasoning for such purely visual sequences in his book "The Name Above the Title", with the words "you've got to give the audience time to look at your people."
Capra explains his reasoning for such purely visual sequences in his book "The Name Above the Title", with the words "you've got to give the audience time to look at your people."
Movies were just better written in those days. Screenwriters were often playwrights and novelists or people who had aspirations to be one or the other. Today, people that write movies and T.V., that's as high as their goals reach, and the ones that can't even do that--well, they're the ones that find jobs writing cartoons.
I don't want to put all the blame on the screenwriters (although I've read a few that make anything Ed Wood produced read like Shakespeare) There's a system that exists in Hollywood today that insists every script needs to be rewritten. A friend of mine has a daughter that worked as a scriptreader for a major studio, and she used to say that every time she recieved a new script, she'd be told to "change at least three things". Once she was through with it, the script would pass through a series of readers and commitees that would make changes of their own. If a certain star was being considered, the script would again be rewritten to accomodate the actor. Sometimes the whole script would be thrown out and replaced with an extremely abreviated treatment that would be rewritten by another team of writers and more than likely continue to be rewritten until the film was finally shot. This explains why most (big studio) films made today make very little sense.
This looks like a cool book - I'm a big fan of Capra's movies - and it's great that these screenplays are in print. I'm sure you've seen the Preston Sturges screenplay books - he's another master of "word music" - Yeah, it would be nice if animation writers could write like Riskin, Sturges, Hecht, Furthman or George Kaufman - - But those guys took months to write a single script - polishing and perfecting it - This is another lost art - like expressive character animation.
Capra's Book offers some interesting insights into character development, particularly where he recounts his early years as a gag writer for the silent films.
In their twilight years, Capra and Walter Lantz became fast friends, recounting their youth when both, at different times, worked for Mack Sennett.
Eddie, mon semblable,—mon frère! How is it that you are always talking about my favorite things in the whole world? How do you even know what they are? You and the FBI must be tapping my brain.
The best of the old writers were not just writing dialogue -- they were writing movies, and their thinking, as you show, was intensely visual throughout.
I think the reasons why writing is not as good today as it was back then are partly economic. In those days, Hitchcock could call in a wonderful writer like Evan Hunter or Ernest Lehman and say "Okay, I want you to write me up a movie with a chase scene involving Mount Rushmore National Monument." In other words, he could treat them as hired servants. Today, writers of that caliber can't be treated that way. They either have tenure at some university or loyal fans who give them lots of money. In a way, that's progress!
Another reason is ideological: the growth of the idea that "the" fimmaker is the director. Writers get, if anything, even less respect today than they got during the golden age. And that is saying a lot!
Mark: You're right, the script pages won't enlarge. They were scanned in large so that's not the problem. When Blogger's working again I might be able to fix it.
Fortunately Kelly's black and white photo in the previous post still enlarges so the male race can rest easy on that score.
Lester: Except for the animation industry where writers get far too much respect and artists are second-class citizens.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm really happy that the site's attracted a professional philosopher. It gives us a touch of class!
Larger Picture Links
Script
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
2nd Picture
Rogelio: (Gasp!) How did you do that!!!??
Thanks much!
>Thanks for the kind words. I'm really happy that the site's attracted a professional philosopher. It gives us a touch of class!
Big, deal, Eddie! I'll have you know I'm a card carrying DLS.
What is oratory?
Also, have you ever seen The Departed? It's my new favourite modern movie.
>Rogelio: (Gasp!) How did you do that!!!??<
You just take the URL of the small picture and change the part where it says
/s400/
and change it to
/s1600-h/
The first picture in your MORE LIFE DRAWING REFERENCE post also wouldn't enlarge
so I got the URL
http://bp2.blogger.com/_Rs53-
MPsJaI/Rk_1EfjMyI/AAAAAAAABZw/
pVsxvZQ7DxI/s400/2yzzp.JPG
and changed it to
http://bp2.blogger.com/_Rs53-
MPsJaI/Rk_1EfjMyI/AAAAAAAABZw/
pVsxvZQ7DxI/s1600-h/2yzzp.JPG
which gives me a bigger picture
I've always wondered why people think of It's a Wonderful Life to be so sappy and sentimental. The whole movie is just an hour 40 minutes of depressing, tragic events of George getting totally shafted, then he has a bright & epiphanous ten to fifteen minutes. It's fantastic, but I can't understand the reputation.
It's also strange to see that movie sold at Wal-Mart every christmas season when the whole movie's about George's fight with what is essentially Wal-Mart.
Where in the script is all that purely visual exposition you seem to be suggesting? Page 1, 2 ,or 3? I do see a lot of dialog.
There is the old cliche about directors taking pages of exposition, including dialog, and tearing them up, throwing them away, getting the same story point with a few camera set-ups, or an actor somehow expressing with a simple expression the same that a script may be taking pages of dialog to explain.
Sometimes this is done and the story is still sticking to the script, and the story telling point would not have been shot, had it not been in the script, but some writers complain that the dialog was not followed word by word. The interpretation is not always antagonistic.
Peter Bogdonovich's collection of director interviews, "Who the Devil Made It", repeatedly addresses this exact script vs screen scenario.
Jorge: Oratory? it's...well, look it up on Dictionary.com!
Anon: Capra and Lantz friends? Amazing!
JohnA: What a horror story! It's the same for development executives at some animation studios. Executives who want promotion know they have to make changes in whatever they get, regardless of its quality.
Kent: Who is Furthman?
Rogellio: Son of a gun! Thanks for the explanation! And thanks again for the links!
William: The Wal-Mart comment was interesting but I hope future posts will persuade you to change your mind about Wonderful Life. I love that film, though I've seen it too many times lately.
Anon: I had to leave out the script pages which precede Mr. Deeds' speech to the writers. I have to scan text at a high res and too much of that makes the site download slow.
Eddie--I don't think William was dissing "Life"--I think he quite digs it...he's just pointing out a truth, often overlooked: for a happy Xmas "family classic" it's hands down one of the darkest films of the american mainstream studio era.
The big reason the ending works so well is that the middle section is beyond bleak--with George devoid of hope, suicidal, beaten down and unrewarded--before finally getting some personal redemption(though that money is stll missing, and he's still poor and stuck in that town controlled by Potter.)
I love Riskin's work. He dated Carole Lombard, too. I'll bet he was a hell of a guy. Carole was choosy.
jenny: What are you doing here? I thought you were in Paris! I was looking forward to dispatches from the City of Light.
Haha! Admit it!
"You don't even know what oratory means, do you?"
"Well...do you?!"
"No!"
Sorry Eddie for the confusion. Jenny's right, I love Wonderful Life more than any Capra films(well, not more than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) but I was complaining about how the film was commonly seen, not how it actually is. It's a really dark film, sort of depressing overall but I love it- it's deep, melancholic, meaningful strife that sets you up for the sudden good at the end. I just think the reputation is wrong to say it's a sapfest.
Capra had a real fantastic sense of optimism in the face of harsh reality. The man could see all that was wrong with America but still could see right to its soul and love it even harder.
But yeeeaaeah, Jenny, thought you were in that moveable feast, the land of Sarkozy and Wine?! Get off that internet cafe!
>> Who is Furthman?
Jules Furthman was a screenwriter with an impressive resume (Rio Bravo, Nightmare Alley, Mutiny on the Bounty-1935, Shanghai Express, The Big Sleep, etc.) He often collaborated with Howard Hawks, and he's usually regarded as one of the greatest Hollywood writers.
Hammerson: Thanks! I'll look him up!
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