HUMANITY BATH

and thinking about relationships

Happy Friday!

I’m three months into my self-restoration project and still going strong.

My new worry is that it’s too routine. I eat roughly the same things every day because I know it will keep me in a caloric deficit, I go to the same two YMCAs in the neighborhood, I walk the same routes and hiking trails. I worry that I’m not being exposed to new things that will spark new connections between all the data points in my brain.

I talked about this in the earliest issues of this newsletter but so much of creativity is fueled by novelty. Early in the pandemic we were all feeling uninspired and for good reason. We were stuck in the same spaces, with the same people, day in and day out. We needed new stimuli. I’ve put myself into a hermit-like state to stay on track with my goals. We used to go out for at least 50% of our meals, now I cook 90% of them at home. I used to write in coffee shops and cafes, now I write at my desk while sipping a Liquid Death instead of an iced coffee. It’s a trade-off.

Yesterday, I had to drive down to Orange County to pick up a specific kind of dog treat that Ellie loves (yes, I know how that sounds). I decided to change things up and buy a day pass for an LA Fitness near the pet food shop. It was five times the size of my neighborhood YMCA and filled with people I’d never seen before. It was energizing, hearing conversations going in multiple languages all around me.

I have been listening to the audio version of Ed Zwick’s terrific book, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions. It’s filled with hard won wisdom from his decades of making movies and television, and written with an honesty and self-awareness that I find heartening. I can’t recommend it enough for anybody working in show business. One of the tips he gives for when he gets stuck on a script is to take a “humanity bath.”

“If you’re going to write about people you might as well go out among them.”

Excellent advice, which I look forward to following once I’ve hit my goals.

Fortunately, I haven’t felt stuck, creatively, over the past couple of months.

I’ve been pressing ahead with this new feature spec and trying to stay focused mostly on the characters and the relationships, rather than racing through a beat sheet, or working out plot moves. I’m almost forty pages in and all of these sequences are heavy on character with just enough plot to move the story forward to the next scene. It’s a little slow going but I have yet to write a placeholder scene or even a minor character that doesn’t have a personality and a point-of-view.

One of the go-to “rules” for screenwriters is that every scene has to reveal character or move the story forward. But I think a subset of “reveal character” is “explore relationship dynamic.” I talked about this in an earlier issue of this newsletter. Back then I quoted Vincent Murphy from his book, Page to Stage:

“Most relationships have discernible patterns of behavior that reveal what holds the two people together, what they want from each other, what they love about each other, or at least what they need from each other. What holds them in the relationship when conflict pushes at its seams? To dramatize these patterns, there are two significant methods for constructing a relationship. The first is by analogy: what is the relationship like? A mother-child relationship might be like (a) a wrestling match, (b) a strict teacher and an undisciplined student, or (c) a beautifully danced tango. Any of these parallels would unlock revealing behaviors that can be extrapolated into what the women play with each other.”

And this:

“What makes the relationships in each story unique is not only their epoch and circumstances but also the vocabulary of expression the playwright or adaptor uses to communicate their specifics. As you look for the threads that tie your characters together, be alert to the specifics of their language with each other that establish their unique relationship. Also pay attention to any nonverbal patterns between the characters that establish their unique connections to each other. Behavior is theatrical vocabulary.”

For a brief, shining moment it looked like I was going to get to throw my hat into the ring on a really cool project that had elements that reminded me of MIDNIGHT RUN. I hadn’t seen it in twenty years but I watched it again a couple of weeks ago to make sure I was using it correctly as a comp. I fell in love all over again. Top ten, for sure.

The plot is fairly straightforward and often repetitive. How many scenes can you have where Yaphet Kotto learns that DeNiro and Grodin got away again? How many times can Dennis Farina threaten to kill his goons if they keep screwing up? You never mind because the characters and relationships are always entertaining. Take the two goons. Goon 1 is on the pay phone getting threatened by Dennis Farina’s mob boss, while Goon 2, too dumb to understand the severity of the situation, is shadow boxing him like a middle school kid on a playground.

Of course the whole thing rests on DeNiro and Grodin. It's a love story, ultimately, between two men. They start out with diametrically opposed goals and are in conflict the entire movie. They each undergo a change by the end, which changes a third entity, which is the nature of their relationship, or who they are together.

Even though the opportunity to pitch for the job disappeared my MIDNIGHT RUN rewatch turned out to be great inspiration for this current spec. It’s a love story, set against the backdrop of an adrenaline-fueled heist story.

I started by writing scenes where the two main characters had surface level disagreements that are clearly masking the deeper issue between them. The deeper issue is that their relationship fell apart two years ago and neither is ready to take responsibility for why that happened. There’s still love there, but there’s also pain, and, what I realized while writing these scenes, also an undercurrent of fear. By exploring their dynamic I started to uncover the nature of those fears.

She’s afraid of X. He’s afraid of Y. Those two fears are incompatible, at least until they’re honest with each other about those feelings. Once I figured that out I knew I had a target for late in the script. At some point they will have to call those fears by their name and make a decision — where do we go from here? Ideally, it happens in what some books would call an “all is lost moment,” when they’re in the metaphorical foxhole, facing certain death. Although I think mine is a bit like Butch and Sundance, or Thelma and Louise, facing a no-win situation at the end. I don’t know if these two characters survive yet, but I know it won’t matter one way or the other to them once they’ve had this conversation.

So, this is a long way of saying that, rather than fleshing out all the twists and turns of the heist plot and trying to jam an emotional story on top after the fact, I figured out the characters and the love story first. I’d like to say I started out with this intention but I kind of felt my way through it in the dark. Which is funny because I’m doing the exact thing I said I wanted to get better at in that old issue about relationships:

One of the first notes I got on the BARBARELLA format was, “Tell us more about the relationships she has with the other members of the team. What are the dynamics?” Who is fighting? Who is falling in love? Who is she leaning on? Who is leaning on her? This is all stuff that I knew. I’d been light on it in the pitch and hadn’t given much more weight to it in the documents. But it’s exactly the stuff buyers want to know because it’s one of the major elements audiences tune in for, especially in television.

Two of my favorite recent shows, PEACEMAKER and YELLOW JACKETS, do a masterful job of establishing relationships early on and taking you on a journey of those relationships in series. Immediately, I’m thinking of Natalie and Misty. I’m thinking of Peacemaker and his father, Peacemaker and Harcourt, Peacemaker and Vigilante. He had specific and sharply drawn relationships with each one of those other characters and each one had a full and satisfying arc by the end.

These relationships don’t exist in the margins of the plot — they’re central to the story. In some cases they ARE the story. That seems like common sense but it’s something I still struggle with all the time. I love a good, propulsive plot. I can come up with cool characters and twisty, turny mechanics all day long but I have to work much harder at laying the foundation for deeper, richer relationships with long-term story potential. 

I think part of the reason I struggle is that I don't take enough time to just get very specific about what these dynamics are early in the process. They kind of get muddled in throughout. Sometimes they get grafted on after the fact, which has rarely been successful for me.

We’ll see how it goes this time. Slightly new angle on the process for me this time around but I’m having fun and building plenty of momentum.

Quick business update: new TV spec is out to studios. Got some good news on the director front for ROAR. The novel is still in a holding pattern. There are a few other things in motion but nothing I can get specific about yet. Still feels like things are moving at a slow pace. If you’re working right nos, if you sold something recently, count your blessings.

Two things I wanted to share with you.

1. Great article in The New York Times about bargaining like a hostage negotiator.. Lots of inspiration for ways to attack your scene work.

2. I’m obsessed with the new Kacy Musgraves record. Here’s a super cool Youtube video where she takes you through the writing process for one of my favorite songs on the record. It’s a great example of how the specifics lead to the universal.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with this quote from Ed Zwick’s book that has been haunting me all week:

“There are only two kinds of movies: memorable, and forgettable.”

I think about it every time I sit down to work on this spec. I want every sequence, every scene, every beat to be working in the service of memorable.

Have a great weekend.

Your friend who loves you and is rooting for you,

Mickey