Where's the Drama?

WALKABOUT ART

2012-01-05T16:45:00.003+11:00

(Above) Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa and Paddy Carroll Tjungarrayi at Papunya NT

"I can’t see what possible interest Aborigines or Australian poetry could have for Americans," the project officer said flatly. It almost sounded rehearsed. A tour of California and the American southwest by three Australian performance poets and two Aboriginal songmen? How would this benefit Australian taxpayers? How was this going to enrich Australia’s cultural life?

The idea for an exchange had first been suggested in Sydney in 1992, during a late-night conversation over a few bottles of Australian wine. Two American theatre directors – Dave and Ellen Purdy – had been listening to Nigel Roberts and myself read our poetry. "Your stuff’d go down great over there," they said. "Come to the States."

Tours to America by Australian poets were a rarity. In the mid-80s, PiO had gone over with Geoff Page, Joanne Burns and others, reading his poems on what became the legendary "PiO T-shirt Tour". There had also been visits by Les Murray and John Tranter. But nothing to write home about.

Tours to Australia by American poets, on the other hand, were not uncommon. Ginsberg had come in the 70s, as had Robert Duncan and Bob Creeley, Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine. More recently, there had been visits by Gary Snyder and Sterling Plumpp. Americans were out there, on the hustings, taking their poetry everywhere. By comparison, Australia was producing a group of stay-at-home poets whose work, one guessed, had no relevance outside Australia. Australians knew about American poetry, for sure, but Americans with few exceptions didn’t have a clue about what was happening Down Under.

Dave Purdy poured himself another glass of red, then, in a booming voice, declared: "Why don’t we do an exchange! The world ain’t that big!"

In March, 1993, at the insistence of Dave and Ellen, three West Coast American poets – Morton Marcus, Anita Wilkins and Joe Stroud – came to Australia to do a series of readings and workshops in New South Wales, that had been organised by Nigel Roberts and myself. Acting as their hosts, Nigel and I organized readings at the Harold Park Hotel, the Evening Star, and The Resistance Centre. At the University of Newcastle the visitors discussed contemporary American poetry with staff and students. On two or three other occasions they were joined by other Australian and British poets, including PiO, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Morton Marcus, having a particular interest in film, was also invited to present two guest lectures at the prestigious Australian Film, Television and Radio School. The success of their visit, as anticipated, led to the creation and organization of what came to be known as "The American Walkabout Tour".

The Tour – comprised of three performance poets (Nigel Roberts, Terry Whitebeach and myself) and two, tribal Aboriginal songmen/painters (Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa and Paddy Carroll Tjungurrayi) – was billed by the Americans as a "30,000 year continuum of Australian performance art". From ancient song cycles to modern jazz poems, from goanna dreamings to talking blues, the oldest and the newest of oral traditions would be on show. Right from the start, it was an experiment in cultural and social interaction.

(Above) Nigel Roberts performing his poetry

The flight to America was scheduled to leave Sydney on a Friday. Dinny and Paddy arrived the previous Tuesday with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. No suitcases, no money, no passports and no birth certificates. "What are birth certificates?"

The men were over sixty and had never been out of the desert till now; had never seen a "whitefella" until they were well into their forties, and had never heard of a birth certificate, let alone a passport. The Sydney Morning Herald covered the story. The men’s seemingly impossible quest for that little piece of proof, without which they wouldn’t be leaving Australia, made the front page. The Director of Immigration nearly had a breakdown. "In twenty years," he said despairingly, "I never thought I’d have to ask an Aborigine to prove he was Australian." The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs got involved, as did the head of the Finance Committee in Washington, D.C. Finally, with the help of a secondhand book of primitive Australian art – which featured not only Dinny's and Paddy’s work, but also their photographs – Nigel and I managed to convince the bureaucrats that the men were the genuine articles.

(Director of Immigration, Sydney: "I couldn’t get to sleep last night wondering if I’d done the right thing.")

(U.S. Congressman to American Consulate in Sydney: "You make damn sure those men get their visas or heads are gonna roll.")

For the next five weeks - accompanied by the Australian filmmaker, Lindsay Frazer - we journeyed through California and the American southwest. The scope of the tour was phenomenal. From a gold-rush theatre and a garden party in Sonora, California, to a Miwak Indian village and ceremony during a snowstorm in Yosemite. Then onto readings and workshops in San Jose and Santa Cruz; and a cold water flat in San Francisco. In Columbia, California, Dinny and Paddy supervised painting workshops during the day, enlisting the help of over a hundred whitefellas who eagerly assisted them in finishing two, very large dot paintings. The Americans went crazy. "You guys have changed my life!" one woman enthused. Others wrote poems which they gave as gifts. "This is worth a million bucks of great PR," a travel agent said.

After the first week, the pattern was set: dot painting workshops from nine to five; live performances of poems and song cycles in the evenings. Whenever possible, an hour or two was set aside so that Dinny and Paddy (left) could raid the local secondhand clothing stores where they bought dresses, shirts, coats, blouses, belts, and ties for their wives, daughters, sons, grandchildren and cousins. They had come to America with nothing, and after the first week were lugging round a half a dozen suitcases each.

Collectively, we traveled to America to entertain and exchange information with poets and Native Americans – to sing, paint, tell stories and perform poetry. Individually, however, the agendas were much more diverse.

I had returned to the land of my birth, seeking some kind of homecoming, only to realize that nothing much was left of my childhood except for Tootsie Rolls and Dr Pepper.

Nigel Roberts, orbiting in on a pilgrimage to Kerouac and Ginsberg, landed in the middle of the "New Age" and discovered that the old Australian custom of smoking a cigarette was practically a capital offense. Terry Whitebeach, the part-Aboriginal performance poet from Tasmania, explored her own identity and sense of self in the broken mirror of Native American culture.

As for Dinny and Paddy… in the eyes of some, they were the mystic elders, the carriers of ancient wisdom, the connection with a deep, spiritual past so many Americans craved. But was this really a spiritual odyssey through the land of the eagle, or merely a hunt for kuka (steak), beer and singing and painting money for their families?

(Re-birther from Santa Cruz: "Hey, last week we had the Dalai Lama through here! Great to see you guys!")

From small fringe theatres in Santa Cruz and San Francisco to huge auditoriums in San Jose and San Diego, thousands turned out; platoons of poetry lovers, brigades of New-Agers, armies of curiosity seekers. Bill Clinton's America was in a celebratory mood.

Following the trail of the early pioneers, we traveled east on the Super Chief (the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway), across the desert to the trendy New Age world of multi-millionaire Texas oil barons, patrons of the arts, sheltering in the virtual tax haven of PC (politically correct) Santa Fe.

(Aware citizen: "Did you guys know that Santa Fe is on the harmonic energy grid and is built on a huge crystal? By the way, Shirley Maclaine lives near here.")

In the Southwest, the artists and poets visited Native American people at Tesuque and Santa Clara Pueblo, travelling with traditional owners to Abiqui (Georgia O’Keefe’s old stomping grounds) and to the Puye Cliff Ruins, mysteriously deserted in 1300 AD.

As the Tour passed through Navaho and Hopi country, the emphasis changed from readings and painting workshops to sweat lodges, earth blessing ceremonies and lectures about Native American culture. The Aboriginal men didn’t want to know about the sweat lodges, and ended up sleeping through several rather erudite lectures about multi-culturalism delivered by Navaho PhDs.

The cultural exchange between the two tribal people never really eventuated. Paddy and Dinny couldn’t understand why the earth needed blessing – it was already blessed as far as they were concerned.

At Rough Rock, Arizona, a Navaho medicine man accused the old men of being fakes and phonies on account of their refusal to participate in a sweat-lodge ceremony. It was sad. Old Alfred, the medicine man, had been working single-handedly trying to instill within the younger Navaho students some appreciation of the "old ways", and had looked to Dinny and Paddy to lend their support. But the men's ignorance of Indian business made them uncertain. They weren’t prepared to be part of something that might compromise their own law. "That’s their business. We can’t run that game," Paddy said. Paddy and Dinny – whose own culture is still pretty much intact – wanted only to do their paintings and sing their songs.

Alfred’s disappointment turned to rage at their unwillingness, but was quelled once their feelings had been explained to him. Nevertheless, the damage was done. Dinny and Paddy wanted to leave at once. "I’m sorry," Alfred said, "I didn't understand." He sprinkled corn meal over both of men, blessing them and wishing them a safe journey.

As the Walkabout Tour proceeded from the weirdnesses of California consciousness to the arroyos of Arizona and New Mexico, the enthusiasm of discovery started giving way to the rigors of the one-night stand. Do a painitng workshop, do a show, answer questions, sleep, grab a bite, travel a hundred and fifty miles, do another painting workshop... and no days off. A seemingly endless expedition into homes, cultural centers, universities, and Indian reservations.

In California, the Tour had performed for elementary school children in neighborhoods where state-funded programs were attempting to drive out the crack dealers. In San Francisco, Nigel and I spent a Sunday morning roaming the streets where homeless people begged meals in the Land of the Free. Terry, seeking refuge from the Tour and five men, retreated to the security of Anita Wilkins’ house outside Santa Cruz for a couple of nights.

Near Second Mesa, Arizona (above), the poets and songmen spent the afternoon at a Hopi high school, set in some of the most beautiful country in the world. Ironically, the place had no windows.

(Art teacher: "This is a first for this school. You people got these kids outside. Do you know I’m the fifth art teacher this year.")

After a while, performance and life began to merge. What happened on the stage, more a back-play to the sequence of events: Paddy and Dinny ringing Papunya Settlement to see if their families were all right; endless meetings in under-lit corridors; college kids trying to bargain the men down to nothing for their paintings; fevered shopping excursions through K-Mart; the never-ending raids on secondhand clothing stores; and the constant “interfacing” with the American public.

(Numerous Californians: "Thank you so much for sharing with us.")

If nothing else, the Tour proved that Australian culture can travel and does translate. It seemed that we were able to say things to the Americans that Americans were not able to say to themselves. The poetry and the songs and the paintings were not part of American life as Americans knew it, but they still made sense. Perhaps all good art does, but to actually witness it happening, to see that Australian art can have an impact outside Australia was worth all the miles of bland hotels and takeaway dinners. The Tour certainly put to rest the prejudice expressed by the Australian arts bureaucrat who had turned down our request for assistance because she couldn’t see what possible interest Aborigines or Australian poetry could have for Americans.

"I wish I had five dollars," Nigel Roberts said later, "for every American who came up to me and said, 'It’s so good to see that something else in happening in Australia besides Crocodile Dundee'."

(ABOVE) Shiprock - joined by an ancient dreaming track to a site in Central Australia (Eagle dreaming)

In the beginning : THE ATONAL SCREENPLAY

2011-12-29T07:59:00.006+11:00

Any one that has written a screenplay, especially a feature-length screenplay, and is familiar with the constituent elements of musical form will be aware of the relationship that exists between the realisation of a screen story and the composition and performance of a piece of music. Both are essentially time-arts distinguished by the way in which their common elements contribute - in both - to building and releasing emotional energy in time.

Both screenplays and musical compositions have tempo, texture, tonality and dynamics, as well as beat and meter, timbre, harmony, and dissonance. They are differentiated by the fact that the musical experience is fundamentally conjured out of sound and silence; whereas the dramatic experience proceeds by way of images and cuts.

Another element central to both is voice, which references character. On a rudimentary level, you can delineate the musical “characters” in terms of percussion, string, brass, woodwind and keyboard instruments, as well as the human voice. In the creation of a musical experience, each participates and contributes to the Voice of the whole. Likewise, with the screen story, one encounters the voices of the individual characters, as well as the voice (or attitude) of the character that is writing the screenplay, and/or directing it, who also gives voice to his or her tribes, allowing them to have their life in the act of speaking through the story.

The best screenplays and the best films have a voice. Some might refer to it as style. When crystallised and associated with the specific obsessions of a particular director it some times becomes a genre. It is more than anything else, an attitude, a way of looking at and listening to the world. This filmic voice is not merely composed of the many, individual voices of the dramatis personae; it is the voice of all of the musical elements of the story in concert with each other, and includes both what is both visible and perceivably invisible through context and subtext.

Any screenwriter that has ever worked as a medium, that has undergone the initiation of channelling characters and story, understands the essential musicality of the act. Images have tone and weight; scenes have pitch; a character’s contradictions create texture and subtext; the close-up screams. For the medium it is not enough to simply grasp this intellectually, it is important that he/she feels it bodily, the same way you feel music when immersed in it. You cannot enter the drama unless you also enter its music.

The experience of momentum, which is absolutely essential to the creative process, is the dance one does to the music one hears in act of finding the story. By “momentum”, I mean the bodily sense that one is being carried along by forces more powerful and compelling than one’s will. As one enters into the music of the story one tunes in to the inherent rhythms of the characters, images, and sounds. And as one returns again and again, the sluggishness, begins to dissipate. To act or not to act is no longer the question. One participates in the dance. And in the swirl of activity one is captured by movement, by action, by change – and the experience is exhilarating.

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering for fledging screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or because it simply fails to make us care.

What most schools encourage is the uncritical use of jargon, embodied in “recipes, grounded in information, knowledge and choice. For those that embrace such wisdom there is no shorter path to success than through someone else’s advice. Alas, there are few things more pathetic than the sight of an eager screenwriting student hopefully doing the rounds of any number of teacher/script editors looking for validation of his or her undiscovered genius. While not the rule, generally, I have met enough of them to make me more than little squeamish about some of the well-meaning but misguided philosophies that inform the film school industry.

Where are the schools, the teachers, the gurus that understand the creative potential and opportunities afforded by the accidental, the chaotic, the anxiety of exposure and the way in which the unexpected insinuates itself into the creative process? These are the elements that make magic possible, and in most film schools they are mostly ignored, played down or, at best, equated with mistakes and shortcomings.

Certainly, the screenwriting enterprise involves choices; that is not at issue. What is at issue is the screenwriter’s uninformed belief that the writer is the only one entitled to make those choices. This can never be the case, not even when the writer insists upon it.

During the 1960s, I was enrolled in a music course at university where the professor argued that the major difference between tonal and atonal music was predictability. Remembering this, I wondered if this notion might not offer an important insight into the process of dramatic screen story-finding, both in its conception and in its realisation.

Screenwriting is often a lonely, isolated occupation. Cooped up in a room, keeping company with disembodied beings, is not the sort of activity most humans would find appealing. It is easy for the writer to lose sight of his or her own validity. “What are you doing?” someone asks. “Writing a screenplay.” They look back, slightly suspicious or confused. “Oh, but what do you really do?” I have long believed that the insecurity of screenwriters stems largely from their inability to prove their existence. In fact, one might say they don’t exist at all until their screenplay is made into a film, and even then it is the screenplay that exists and not the writer, not unless the film wins an Oscar, in which case the award invariably goes to the producer. Sigh...

What most writers want – though few of them would admit to it – is a guarantee. They want to believe that what they are doing is going to amount to something – like a bad parent: all this blood and sweat and tears poured into this “kid” – he better go out there and make something of himself. Ah, if only one could predict the outcome of one’s efforts! Predictability offers security. Indeed, our ability to predict the future and to have it occur in the way in which we predicted is always a source of great comfort to us. Imagine how disturbing it would be to go to sleep in one’s bed tonight, and, without knowing why or how, wake up in someone else’s in the morning. This is the kind of thing that happens to writers all the time, especially the good ones. So, wouldn’t it be better, safer, and less nerve-wracking if there were some way that the screenwriting process could be made more predictable – some plan that made it possible to see where we were, where we’d been and, most importantly, where we were going? Of course, it is better if the screenplays themselves aren’t predictable, but what about the process of writing one? How predictable is that? And if predictability is not possible, or even wanted, what implications might this have in terms of choice?

I hate to be the one to break the news, not that it should be news, but predictability breeds predictability. You can’t plan for surprise, or freshness, or originality. You can consciously choose those things either. The choice is not to be or not to be; the choice is to dance or not to dance. And when it comes to dancing (read: the adventure of finding a story and its characters), the best choices are hardly ever the result of conscious decision-making.

Let me break it to you this way : the best choices are those that are made by the story, by its music, atonal though it may be at first. What the story shows us and what it goads us towards is openness, effortlessness, spontaneity. It is never the story that resists these impulses, but only ourselves, clutched by an unmanaged fear that were we free enough to let the story become whatever it will we might expose something better left hidden, or open ourselves in ways that leaves us vulnerable to attack. No, we must not let this happen. Story is our fortress, not an escape plan.

For many, the surprising and credible dramatic story beckons almost inaudibly from beyond the ramparts of ego, teasing and tempting us with some faint hope for what lies beyond the walled-city of our prejudices. There, near the vanishing point of a self-important perspective, it is easier to hear than to see. Attend to the music, to the voices, atonal though they may be. If one is to become part of the dynamic musical chemistry of story one must stop tampering with the energies that are at play. Instead of operating from the mistaken belief that you are creating the music (or the drama) become one among many free players that are allowing their playfulness to be, and dance.

A GREAT STORY : NEWS THAT STAY NEWS

2011-12-29T07:44:00.001+11:00

“All visible objects... are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! ” - Herman Melville

Okay, the bad news is: you exist. Whoever you is. You auditioned for the part you're playing, remember? No? Well, Central Casting gave it to you. You said you wanted it. You said you wanted it so bad you'd die for it, remember? No? Give it some time; you will.

Okay, I know there are times - plenty of times - when you find it difficult separating the character you're playing from the YOU that's playing it. Everyone needs a break from the melodrama now and then - that, or turn it into tragedy - or a comedy if you prefer, tho everyone I know reckons comedy is more difficult. I reckon a great story is always difficult, especially if you're struggling to find your character, and even your closest friends don't know you're acting. Luckily, like all characters, your character - like mine (Billy) and her's (Maya) and theirs (you know who you are) - has a use-by date. One way or the other your character's gonna be written out of the script. And eventually it will disappear from the story altogether, though there might be one or two remaining characters that'll preserve the memory of who and what you were in the backstory (tho most probably they'll employ the most heavy-handed exposition).

Your character won't go on forever, despite the fact that YOU exist, and that YOU will always exist, and that will never change. The character you play will change, but the fact that you exist won't.

Existence doesn't become non-existence, mainly because non-existence is already full of all the things that will never exist, and there's no room in non-existence for the things that DO exist.Understand? No? All right then, let's put it this way: existence is the only quality that existence has to be. And that' that. The bad news - and I really hate to break it to you - is that we are all condemned to exist.

And the good news... oh yeah. Well, the good news is entirely up to you.

FEATURE DOCUMENTARY : INDECENT XPOSURE - Coming Soon!

2011-11-30T07:25:00.009+11:00

Journey through the eccentric and dramatic life of the mysterious and reclusive outsider artist, Christina Conrad. The film, in keeping with the artist herself, is an exception to most of the rules - a surprising and confronting mix of odd and original characters, tragic/comic monologues and bizarre improvisations counterpointed by fetishes, masks, icons, paintings, sculptures and photographs, punctuated by an original soundtrack by C.W. Stoneking and Steve Grant.

Accompany Conrad on an unforgettable odyssey of discovery as she exposes the characters behind the legend of her multifarious personality – the child, the barbarian, the earth mother, the misogynist and visionary. Conrad's life-long rebellion against "the art world", conventional wisdom and phony respectability, is waged with a freshness and humour that makes talent - though rare - seem so usual a thing.

For anyone that has ever struggled with the competing demands of domesticity and the tearing ruthlessness of the obsessed artist, here is a saga to inspire courage and confirm the insight that the creative life is always within reach so long as one is prepared to hoe the wilderness of one's own heart and mind. For Conrad it has never been a matter of choice. Indeed, at times, her life has been something of a sentence, she muses; made more difficult by the plight of being a woman.

Midst a seemingly endless juxtaposition of words, images and music, carried along by the on-going avalanche that is her life, Conrad strives to find the means to express and conduct the tumultuous energy that has torn through her since birth. In the process, she conjures a startling and unforgettable documentary that proves once again that the best nonfiction films are "best" not because they are the most informative, or most persuasive, or the most useful, but because they are the most creative, effective, and valuable human documents that can be made from the circumstances represented in them. Running time: 75 mins

Directed by Agnieszka Baginska & Christina Conrad

Written, Produced & Designed by Christina Conrad

Cinematography by Zachary Peel-Mcgregor

Edited by Agnieszka Baginska

Original Music by C.W. Stoneking

THE SET-UP

2011-09-10T08:51:00.000+10:00

Plot : The First 5 to 10 Minutes

Effective screenwriting involves a certain degree of promiscuity fuelled by an unerring obsession to seduce and be seduced. The initial dalliances with character and story might not take place on a computer screen, but at some stage that becomes the metaphorical boudoir in which a lot of the creative energies are developed and exchanged. When it comes to producing a compelling set of relationships, The first evidence of a compelling relationship or set of relationships should occur as early as possible in the script, hooking in the audience with a collection of images and actions that is conventionally referred to as “the set-up”.

The setup is simply the situation, person, entity, institution, or event that gives provide hints about the nature of the of the story world and what the protagonist will ultimately have to contend with in striving to achieve his/her objective or goal.

Take for instance, The Verdict. It is during the set-up we meet the protagonist, the lawyer, Frank Galvin, who plays a desultory game of pinball whilst sipping what’s left of a beer. The outside world through the windows of the bar is cold, grey, and Galvin plays with a complete absence of enjoyment and enthusiasm. He is in fact a layer, down on his luck – a virtual ambulance chaser with a bleak past and a seemingly bleaker future.

Every screen story begins with plot, the course by which the characters – including the writer – navigate the action of the story that is being dramatised. Plot is what we see – it is the structure by which we move from one part of the story to the next.

The thing about structure is that over-plotting will stagnate your creativity and spontaneity, whilst lack of it might very well create confusion. The way to find the middle ground is to follow the characters. It is their journey, a journey in which the writer and audience and tribe have an interest to be sure, but not to the degree that their hopes, expectations and fears usurp the convictions, values and needs of the dramatis personae.

With that said, the set-up generally occurs during the first three minutes or three percent of a script. The set-up allows the audience to get their bearings as they develop a feel for the tone, setting, and pace of the story. It occurs in many forms, but some common ones are:

Back story – think John Carpenter’s The Fog, When A Stranger Calls (1979), Vertical Limit

Present-Life Problem – Inner or Outer conflict. For example, the abusive husband in Sleeping With The Enemy

A hook – intense, dynamic action or situation

Theme – The pimp’s opening monologue in Hustle and Flow, and the intro to Magnolia

Impending Danger – War Of The Worlds, Arachnophobia, The Conversation

A question to be answered/mystery to be solved as in Breakdown, Nature of the Beast

Like a first date, the set-up will get you through the door with your audience. Intrigue them enough and they will stick around…for a bit. Like the props used in a first date, the set-up will get you through the door, but a good story will keep you there.

The 12

2011-08-05T17:09:00.000+10:00

Stoneking's adaptation for screenwriters
of Michael Shurtleff's "12 Guideposts"

Not dissimilar to the actor's quest to "build a character" is the screenwriter's quest to inhabit, and be inhabited by, those characters whose story is slowly coming to life in the evolving screenplay.

Fundamental to this task is the writer's willingness to surrender all claims to preeminence over the action as well as the power to manipulate the characters as he/she sees fit solely in service of the writer's particular needs including the "needs" of the plot as the writer alone understands them. The chauvinism perpetrated by insecurities that preclude a living relationship with the characters, and the writer's refusal to be open to the characters and entering into an authentic engagement with them, is the most common vice of the complacent, mediocre screenwriter. The avoidance of such emotional honesty (or emotional intelligence) is almost always characterised by writing that is actionless, stale, and predictable.

Part of the job of every dramatic screenwriter is to re-write him/herself as ruthlessly as he/she re-writes the characters in the script, which means transcending his/her own prejudices, assumptions and expectations - maladies that mask or dissipate the emotional energy implicit in the characters' problems, goals and actions.

In cultivating ever more intimate relationships with one's characters, one can usefully apply some guideposts. Here are 12 formulated by casting director, writer and teacher, Michael Shurtleff, and adapted so that they might better serve the needs of writers and dramatic filmmakers.

1. Relationship - based on NOW.

a. What is the character's relationship with the other characters?

b. What is the character's emotional attitude toward each of the other characters?

Does the character love him/her?
Does the character hate him/her?
Does the character resent him/her? How much?
Does the character want to help him/her?
Does the character want to get in his/her way?
What does the character want from him/her?
What does the character want him/her to him or her?

2. Conflict: what is the character fighting for? Same as "beats" or motivation.

a. What is the positive the character is seeking?
b. What is the character DOING to get it? Find as many ways as possible.
c. What actions might the character perform in order to get what he/she wants?

3. The Moment Before: each scene is the "emotional middle" of something.

a. What was the character just doing - BEFORE - that provoked or stimulated the action that is NOW occurring?
b. What does the character do that shows he/she is committed to his/her objective?

4. Humor/Hope: what is it that keeps teh character from giving in to despair?

a. What gets the character through the day?
b. What does the character find absurd about the other character or the situation?
c. Is there a moment where the character attempts to lighten the burden for him/herself or the other character?

5. Opposites: is the other end of the spectrum present?

a. Where are both the love and the hate?
b. What extremes does the character feel about the other character?

6. Discoveries: things that happen for the first time. Surprise

a. Avoid the routine, the humdrum. What makes this moment different?
b. What does a character learn about him/herself in the scene?
c. What does the character learn about the other character/s?
d. What did the character learn about the situation, both now and before?

7. Communication and Competition: communication is a circle.

a. Is the character sending out and getting back feelings?
b. Is the character "just talking at"?
c. Is the character open to hearing the other character/s?
d. What does the character DO to show he/she disagrees with the other character/s?
e. Where/when does the character show "I am right and you are wrong"?
f. How does the character say you should change from what you are to what I want you to be?

8. Importance: the truth is not enough if it is neither dramatic, nor interesting, nor unique.

a. What is important to the character right at this moment?
b. Is that the same or different as a moment ago?
c. Is the character making the trivial important?
d. Is the character making the important trivial?

9. Find the Events: what happens in the Screenplay?

a. Is this a change?
b. Is this a confrontation?
c. Is this a turning point?
d. Could the character win or lose something right here and now?

10. Place: where is the character and what does he/she feel about it?

a. Can he/she see it?
b. Can he/she feel it?
c. Can he/she smell it?
d. Is he/she comfortable with it?
e. Why is he/she here/there?

11. Game Playing and Role Playing: the "me" I am now.

a. What role is the character playing?
b. What is the game the character is playing?
c. Who does the character need to be to win the game?
d. How far will thge character go to win?

12. Mystery and Secret: what we don’t know.

a. What can’t be explained?
b. What would the character never tell another?
c. To what lengths would the character go to keep it a secret?
d. Why might it hurt me - the character - if they found out?

WRITING LOGLINES & PREMISES

2011-07-07T09:25:00.000+10:00

"If you can't say it in three sentences, you don't know what your script is about."

A LOG-LINE presents the “what’s-it-about” of a story – the Set-Up, Conflict, and Resolution - and should include all of the following:

•Reveal the protagonist’s SITUATION

•Reveal the important COMPLICATIONS

•Describe the ACTION the protagonist takes

•Hint at the CLIMAX - the danger, the 'showdown'

•Hint at the protagonist’s potential TRANSFORMATION

•Identify SIZZLE: sex, greed, humour, danger, thrills, satisfaction

•Identify GENRE

•Keep it to three sentences

•Use present tense

How can you pack all that into three sentences? If you think of your logline as a commercial for the movie you've seen in your head as you've been writing the script; then you'll breathe life and personality into those three sentences.

Logline for Rainman:
A self-centered hotshot returns home for his father's funeral and learns the family inheritance goes to an autistic brother he never knew he had. The hotshot kidnaps this older brother and drives him cross-country hoping to gain his confidence and get control of the family money. The journey reveals an unusual dimension to the brother's autism that sparks their relationship and unlocks a dramatic childhood secret that changes everything.

Logline for Some Like It Hot:
Two male musicians accidentally witness the St. Valentines' Day massacre; and to elude the mobsters who pursue them, they dress in drag and join an all-girl band headed for Miami. One of them falls for a sexy singer and poses as a Miami playboy so he can woo her; he convinces his pal to dodge the amorous advances of the rather nearsighted Miami playboy he impersonates. Love conquers all -- till the mobsters show up at the same Miami resort for a convention.

THE PROMISE OF PREMISE

PREMISE – “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved; a basis of argument.”

A premise is something to be proved, something asserted as true; it is the writer’s truth concerning the great issues that confront human existence – the ideas and values that inform and confound us – love, death, loyalty, jealousy, prejudice. A premise states what the story is about, what it means, rather than simply recounting what happens. It conveys in a simple proposition the central truth of the story as that truth is understood by the screenwriter. A cogent premise is supported and validated by the actions of the characters; the story is the evidence that either supports or fails to support the story’s premise. If it does not, then there is either something wrong with the story, or something wrong with the premise.

The search for your story’s premise is a meditation on what the story actually means. As such, a premise – at least in the early stages of finding the characters and the story - is not written in stone. You may massage it; elaborate on it; employ it heuristically to test the effectiveness of both the action and the emotions conveyed. A premise is a guide to how well every part of the story supports or resonates with every other part of the story. It may be a stepping stone or a catalyst in the quest to dig ever deeper into the story’s possibilities and to find something new and unexpected there. Your premise should point the direction and vividly illuminate the ultimate goal and meaning of the actions of the characters.

Screenwriter and teacher, Bill Johnson, has said that a premise is a promise. It articulates for the writer and others the truth for which the screenplay offers evidence. If I say I’m going to tell you a story that proves love conquers everything, including death, I better make sure I’m giving you Romeo and Juliet and not Othello.

By way of example, consider the film, Viva Zapata, written for the screen by John Steinbeck, from a novel (uncredited) by Edgecumb Pinchon.

The log-line of this film might be stated as: “Emile Zapata, a good man, struggles against oppression, and in the end becomes an oppressor himself.”

BUT the premise will be: “Good men who fight against injustice sometimes discover through their actions that they, themselves, become the perpetrators of injustice." (Viva Zapata)

If the premise is borne out by the story, if the story “proves” through what it shows us that the premise is true, then we can say that the story has succeeded in accomplishing what it set out to do.

Premises deal with universals, like love, courage, greed, freedom, justice, death, duty, play, the nature of our responsibilities to ourselves and to others…

A premise is usually wider than a simple statement of a theme (e.g.: all men are brothers, war is hell, etc) because it includes in its expression the fulfillment of the dramatic issue that lies at the core of the story. Thematic statements don’t always contain this fulfillment stage. Every cohesive and emotionally logical dramatic screen story is capable of articulation in a well-formulated premise of one sentence. When it comes to writing energetic, vital screenplays, there is no idea or situation that is potent and meaningful enough on its own to carry you from beginning to middle to end unless it can be expressed in terms of a clear-cut premise.

CREATING PREMISES

(with acknowledgments to Bill Johnson)

Every human being is a bundle of presuppositions. Another word for a presupposition is PREMISE. Hence, every human being is a bundle of premises.

Some of these premises are significant and some aren’t.

A significant presupposition might be: “You can only keep what you are prepared to give away.”

An insignificant presupposition might be : “Broccoli puts hair on your chest.”

The significant ones are the ones that ought to attract our attention as storytellers.

Some times an insignificant presupposition can be made significance by virtue of a story.

One premise can lead to many stories…

Knowing one’s premises is really knowing oneself. And writers, like everybody else, don’t usually know that much about themselves, or they know what is comfortable for them to know and repress or hide the rest. They’ve been “taught” to do this – like everyone else – since they were very young.

It is idiotic to go hunting for a premise OUT THERE, in the world. A best story premises are the ones that are already alive and within you. Find one of these, one that reflects or reveals a powerful conviction that you hold about the nature of human and/or non-human reality.

The act of creating a story becomes – in part - an act of clarification – an opportunity to explore and clarify to yourself (and others) a conviction or value that you hold dear.

Do you know what your convictions are?

Do you ever look them over? Are there any that you would die for?

Anyone who has a few strong convictions is a mine of premises. And a storyteller – or at least, a potential storyteller.

Storytelling is about self-discovery. We tell stories in order to find out what and who we are…

A PREMISE GROWS OUT OF THE ACT OF DISCOVERING THE STORY THAT WANTS TO BE TOLD…

A good premise is a thumbnail synopsis of the idea behind the story, and MUST contain the following:

1. The CENTRAL THEME, idea or dramatic ISSUE.
2. The defining ACTION, movement or conflict
3. The FULFILLMENT of the idea or value.

The creation of an inspired story is not possible UNLESS the storyteller commits him/herself to a POINT OF VIEW…

Until the author takes sides there can be no story.

When the author champions one side of an issue or another, a premise becomes possible.

This does not mean that the writer oversees a rigged game. The veracity of the premise is worthless unless it has been actively challenged by formidable and capable opposition.

We, the audience, might not agree with your conviction. BUT through your story, you have a chance to prove the validity of your contention, and make us re-think our own prejudices and assumptions.
To have a chance of changing your audiences attitudes, you must lead them into the sort of world in which YOUR PREMISE can be true, and SHOW them the life of that truth as embodied by characters whose quest we care about.

The story must prove the premise.

The premise is a promise concerning the sort of story you intend to tell.

WHERE'S THE DRAMA? WEBSITE - JOIN TODAY!

2011-06-27T11:39:00.000+10:00

Is the latest draft of your screenplay giving you a sinking feeling? Don't go down with the ship.

I love the poet, Muriel Rukeyser, because she understood that "the world is made of stories, not atoms". You don't have to be a poet to understand this, but it helps. Have a look around. Stories are a force of nature. We didn't evolve from apes; we sprang into life fully formed and thoroughly anxious, embodied by stories.

Story is our essence, the source and expression of every relationship, ambition, dread, birth, death and discovery. Our humanity and inhumanity is rooted in, tangled in the mystery of "how come?" and the suspense of "what next?"

Story is Nature's way of becoming conscious of itself, and as storytellers we work with it to become conscious of ourselves. One writes a story to find out why one is writing it, and in the process discovers that the story is writing us as much as we are writing it.

When Jackson Pollack spoke of a painting as having a life of its own he underscored the central insight of every mediumistic artist. To work as a medium, the screenwriter/filmmaker must forge intimate and emotionally vivid relationships with ALL of the characters necessary for finding the story, and only some of these characters actually exist in the script. In the act or acts of forming and testing these relationships, the screenwriter/filmmaker begins to realise that the story is neither mine nor theirs, but ours.

THE MEANS IS FILM - THE MEDIUM IS

THE FILMMAKER

WHERE'S THE DRAMA? is the leading question at the heart of the development of every screen story, yet "drama" is usually the very element that many filmmakers leave out. Why is this? And what can be done about it? Find out what you, the writer - as one "character" among many - can do to revolutionise screen storytelling and the world of screen culture generally. Industry and non-industry film and programme makers - as well as film audiences, reviewers and critics - are invited to become part of the web's most exciting and unique online "conversation". Discover and explore the world of mediumistic, dramatic screen storytelling.

Join today. It's FREE!

Go to http://www.wheresthedrama.com/apps/members/ to register.

LET'S DO LUNCH : Story & Script Services

2011-06-26T12:22:00.000+10:00

LET'S DO LUNCH

Informal Story Consults
with Billy Marshall Stoneking

NOW AVAILABLE ON SKYPE!!

The popularity and success of this informal and inspiring approach to script development has already been phenomenal. Satisfaction guaranteed or you pay NOTHING. So, let's do lunch, eh? and talk about it.

Writers and writer/directors, producers, and others with a project at any stage of development are invited to book a consult now.

USUAL VENUE: In Sydney at the Fundamental Food Co., Glebe Point Road, Glebe (across from Cornstalk Books) Mondays - Fridays (by appointment only - use BUTTON above right to make an appointment)

Special rate: Only $50 per hour

Satisfaction guaranteed or you pay nothing!

SKYPE CONSULTS also available by appointment -
SKYPE ID: billy.marshall.stoneking

BOOK ONLINE using BUTTON above right, or write to stonekingseminars@hotmail.com

SCRIPT EDITING

GIVE YOUR SCREENPLAYS THE EDGE THEY DESERVE

BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING encourages writers to tell the stories that MEAN something to them – that is, stories in which the storyteller has an emotional investment, stories that the storyteller feels passionately connected to and needs to tell.

The role of the script editor is to ILLUMINATE, to assist and guide the cinematic storyteller in uncovering and fully exploring the emotional meanings that lie buried in their characters' actions, and to ensure that that these actions clearly dramatise the storyteller’s understanding of the story world that inhabits him/her.

It is a truism, but probably worth repeating: the journey of the storyteller is a journey of self-discovery. It starts from the known and moves towards the unknown. It isn’t simply a case of the writer writing a story; the story also writes the writer!

Stoneking has consulted on numerous award-winning and commercially successful short and feature films, documentaries and television series, including CHOPPER (Andrew Dominick's AFI award-winning film), THE MAGICIAN (SBS-TV series by Scott Ryan), RICHARD and TWO (Maya Newell), THE SAVIOUR (Academy-award nominated short by Peter Templeman), BIRTHDAY BOY (Academy-Award nominated 3D animation short by Sejong Park), OUT ON THE TILES and ALI AND THE BALL (Dendy and St Kilda Festival award-winning films/scripts by Alex Holmes), and many many others.

SCREENPLAY COVERAGE

You've spent weeks, maybe months or even years, working with your characters and your story and you're no longer sure if it's as good as you "think" it is... why not go the extra distance and be absolutely certain its as good as it can possibly be before you enter it into the next screenplay competition or offer it up to a film school selection panel, or an agent or a production company.

For a new screenwriter, breaking into the motion picture industry is never easy. Some enter screenplay competitions in the hope they'll gain much needed exposure. Others query and submit their original screenplays directly to agents and producers. Whether you choose the screenplay competitions/movie contests or festivals route, or submit your script to agents and producers directly, you only get ONE chance, so make it count!

Stoneking's coverage gives you an opportunity to test your screenplay on an astute and objective "audience", and receive the kind of constructive feedback that will illuminate your script's strengths and weaknesses.

Those who use this service will receive notes covering story, premise, plot, character development, dialogue, structure, format, and production value.

Address initial enquires to Stoneking at stonekingseminars@hotmail.com

RE-WRITING YOUR SCRIPT

2011-06-19T08:49:00.000+10:00

William Goldman has been quoted as saying that a screenplay is not written, it’s re-written, and most of the screenwriters I know would readily agree with this. Nevertheless, it would seem that many of the writers I work with don’t always work in a way that indicates that they fully appreciate the fine art of re-writing, which is itself a thoroughly creative act or series of acts demanding as much if not more of the writer than the blank page. When considering the nature of the beast, one could do worse than to conceive of re-writing as a re-write of the writer, who – by the way – is also one of the characters whose actions are germane to the success or otherwise of the story-being-found. However, all of this is so much theory until one actually sits down and faces the problems that come with any constructive and useful re-writing of a screen drama. When facing the potential horrors of the next draft, one might do wll to consider the following:

1. Take a break between your last draft and your next one. Walk away from the computer. Clear your thoughts. Take a drive, or a short holiday – break the routine with which you’ve become accustomed. Stay away from the script for at least a couple of days. Or even a week. When you come back to what you are writing, come back fresh, as a virtual stranger.

2. Print the script out on paper.

3. Take the printed copy and find a comfortable place – preferably NOT where you usually write. The more remote the better (a public bus, for example) or a table at the back of an uncrowded café)

4. Read the whole script through, crossing out everything that is not absolutely relevant or emotionally meaningful to the building and releasing of energy. This includes dialogue and BIG PRINT. Get rid of as many “ands” and “buts” as possible. Avoid passive voice and prosaic description. Make it live. Make it lean. Excise everything that is not absolutely essential to the spirit of the characters and their story.

5. Inscribe ALL changes onto the computer, print out new draft. Go for a walk. Leave it for a day.

6. Print out new draft, read through the entire draft, noting all the things you like. Use “ticks” or even take the pages you like and set them in a separate pile. Do the same for those sections or pages that are just ok (use a “+”), and for the pages you hate (use an “X”).

7. Take the first fifteen pages. Check the rhythm and flow of the visual action, shot by shot, scene by scene. Identify the objectives of each character in each scene. Make sure that each one is “fighting” or struggling for something.

8. Using a pen, writing on the script, “blow up” or expand upon those scenes that lack drama ad/or clarity. Delete any scenes that do not instance change in the fortunes of the characters. Make sure that your main characters are active and that their actions are clearly motivated.

9. Identify the "dramatic problem" (disturbance or catalyst) that compels the main character/s to act. What is driving the central character/s and what dramatic question does the existence of this problem prompt one’s audience to ask?

10. Keep working on the first ten to fifteen pages until they work for you - the writer – as well as for your (imagined) audience. (See AUDIENCE)

11. When you are satisfied that you cannot do anything more to improve the opening fifteen pages, go on to the next fifteen pages and repeat the process.

12. Continue to work on the script, fifteen pages at a time until you have reached the end. Under no circumstances must you go on to the next fifteen pages until you are satisfied with the fifteen pages that you are currently working on.

13. When you have reached the end, go for a walk. Take a few days off. Come back to the script fresh and enter ALL the changes you have made to the script into the computer. Relax. Take a few days off.

14. Come back to the computer fresh. Read through the script from the perspective of your audience. Use ticks to check off what you like, pluses to indicate what is ok and X’s to signify what still needs work. An astute audience will be cognizant of many issues simultaneously, e.g.: is the story emotionally logical. Are the actions of the characters clearly motivated? Is the action and dialogue concise? Does it convey the emotional energy that is germane to the characters’ predicament? Does it conduct the audience into a relationship with the characters? What is confusing? Are there unneeded repetitions?

15. For dialogue, read it out loud in the patches where it feels rough. Read it to a stranger. On a bus or a train. You will hear what it is that you don’t need or what sounds inauthentic. Cross out everything that isn’t coming from the character that is actually speaking it. (NOTE: A lot of dialogue that is written performs as internal notes to the writer that the writer has written to him/herself. Beware those “writer-talking-to-himself lines”.

16. After polishing the draft, have some actor friends do a read of the script; pick someone good to do the narration.

17. Fill out a Drama Report. Have everyone who attended the reading fill out a Drama Report (See DRAMA REPORT) – take a few days off.

18. Re-read script. Read reports. Repeat entire process as required.

THE DOCUMENTARY VISION

2011-06-10T15:13:00.000+10:00

Film theorist, Richard Barsam has written: “The best nonfiction film is a creative film, not a literal record of some happening or a straightforward piece of argument or a twisted piece of propaganda ... as with all art, the question is one of degree: the degree of creativity ... The best nonfiction films are best not because they are the most informative or the most persuasive or the most useful, but because they are the most creative, effective, and valuable human documents that can be made from the circumstances represented in them ...”

Where's the Drama? is proud to present a unique collection of documentaries that dramatise the veracity of Richard Barsam's observations. Collected together on one site, these documentaries represent a broad cross-section of styles and concerns. Each in its own way tells a dramatic story and provides vigorous evidence that is sure to stay with the viewer long after the film has ended.

Whilst the films collected here do not represent an exhaustive collection of the best or even the most creaive docos (in Barsam's sense of the word), they do provide a rather comprehensive selection of issues, concerns, obsessions and characters that will hold your attention.

WATCH FILMS NOW at http://www.wheresthedrama.com/apps/videos/channels/show/2211854-documentaries

AND
For those readers interested in a more comprehensive discussion of the art of documentary, please visit THE DRAMA OF DOCUMENTARY at http://www.wheresthedrama.com/documentary.htm

SCREENWRITERS' POLL No. 1

2011-05-21T14:42:00.000+10:00

WHAT SORT OF SCREENWRITER ARE YOU?

I've known screenwriters that made up all sorts of rules for themselves - writers that couldn't write if there were dishes in the sink, or dirty clothes that needed washing. Others decided they had to indulge in some kind of daily ritual - like jogging down to the local cafe to read the paper and a cuppa coffee - before actually sitting down at the typewriter or computer to work. A playright I knew in Melbourne could write unless he smoked, and when the smoking started affecting his health the only way he could give it up was to stop writing. Go figger.

A common habit of many screenwriters I have known is that they assign to themselves a time for writing. I've known plenty of writers that would swear they couldn't make so much as a sentence unless they did so in the first two or three hours after waking> Others - for various reasons - would never think of attempting so much as a scene until two or three hours after sundown. I've always found these "rules" rather odd because my in my experience - owing, I suspect, to the diversity of unconventional places in which I have lived, has never allowed such regularity. As a result, I have developed a facility for writing at almost any time, even in my sleep.

So I was wondering what other writers might report concerning their "best writing" times. Be honest. What time of the day - or approximate time of the day (or night)do you do your best work?

Free Survey

VISIT THE DRAMA SHOP

2011-04-26T15:18:00.000+10:00

Choose from a variety of quality items, including jackets, jerseys, t-shirts, mugs & cups, bags, baby gear, diaries and other unusual and original accessories. Great for gifts and presents for cast & crew. Rare items for discriminating filmmakers and their friends. Custom orders may be placed using your own logo/graphic and/or film/tv project title.

Apply to Stoneking Seminars for special, custom orders, e.g. gifts for cast & crew.

VISIT THE DRAMA SHOP BY CLICKING ON LINK BELOW

http://www.wheresthedrama.com/onlinedramashop.htm

And be sure to check out THE ANNEX while you're at it!

THE COMMON UNDERSTANDING

2011-04-25T07:50:00.000+10:00

SOME DEFINITIONS

A dramatic story presents an identifiable character (or characters) in pursuit of understandable and emotionally logical objectives. In the quest to attain his/her objectives, the dramatic character encounters increasing opposition and risk tht carry with them even greater stakes, thus heightening the audience's identification and emotional involvement with the character.

Collaboration is a largely intuitive and mutually respectful, creative interaction among skilled individuals working towards a common goal based upon a shared understanding of the nature of the work in which they are engaged.

Given the nature of dramatic stories and the collaborative character of dramatic, screen storytelling, WHERE'S THE DRAMA? posits that filmmakers and film crews have a better chance of succeeding when their actions are guided by a "common understanding" of the nature of the work and the play in which they are engaged. This common understanding is constituted by - though not necessarily limited to - the following:

Dramatic stories are structured presentations of emotional energy that involve characters whose incompatible agendas produce disconnections or conflicts that create meaningful and often substantial risk for the characters’ well being, forcing them to act in the hope of re-establishing some degree of order or control.
The rhythmic and proximate interplay of these conflicting agendas is enacted by characters and is the source of a story’s emotional energy.

A dramatic story proceeds by either building or releasing this energy.

These two elemental tendencies – the building and releasing of emotional energy – are what characterise the movement of all dramatic stories.

A story’s power is proportional to its effectiveness in building and releasing energy in ways that are fresh, unexpected and thoroughly credible.

When a story stops building energy, or is unable to effectively release it, the energy dissipates, which is another way of saying the story becomes undramatic.

Therefore...

Regardless of form, effective storytellers will have a passionate interest in the source, manifestation and transformation of this energy, i.e.: the characters and their actions.

In mastering the language that IS dramatic screen storytelling, the collaborative team of storytellers and their characters become partners in finding the emotional meaning of the story that is to be told.

This partnership also includes the audience and the tribe or tribal groups whose story is being found and shown. In a sense, ALL of the participants, including the filmmakers are characters.

The presentation of characters internal to the script is mediated by the capture of images and sounds relevant to those characters, their world and the dramatic questions that the characters’ problems cause us – as both storyteller and audience – to ask.

All effective dramatic screen stories proceed via the building and the strategic release of emotional energy conveyed through these images and sounds.

Essential to the effective rendering of dramatic screen stories is the compelling selection and ordering of these images and sounds, as guided by the emotional energy generated by the actions of the characters.

A screen story that is dramatic and effective produces fresh, unexpected and credible images and juxtapositions of images by which this energy is built and released.

The finding and the capture of fresh, unexpected and credible images and their juxtaposition is made more possible when the filmmaker/storytellers are working from inside the emotional life of the character.

The images should serve the story, not the other way around.

Therefore, all craft questions are implicitly questions about character and story.[1]

THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARACTER

Meaningful dramatic action is, by definition, an expression of a character’s problems, goals and plans. The changes that occur within any dramatic story are the actions of that story, and are predominantly manifested by a story’s characters. A story begins and develops when a character first creates and then transforms or transfers emotional energy. This should happen in every scene, and from one scene to the next, and even between scenes (in the cut). The source of this energy is CHARACTER, hence the success or failure of every dramatic story is inextricably bound up with character, into which, through which and from which the emotional energy of any story is constantly rushing.
_______________________________________________________
[1] E.g.: Coverage implies an understanding of a character’s actions, and the meaning of each scene in which a character acts... remembering that characters also live (and ACT!) in the cut.

NON-ACTION & THE MEDIUMISTIC SCREEN STORYTELLER

2011-04-23T16:52:00.000+10:00

“Coming to meet halfway is possible only between people who are mutually honest and sincere in their way of life.” I Ching

I gave up reading books about the craft of screenwriting a long time ago. The two or three I actually dipped into made my head ache. Forget about inspiring vision or even a modicum of passion; they simply reduced the process of dramatic narrative to a manipulation of events, turning points and positive and negatively charged actions. Fair enough, I guess, if you’ve managed to actually get past the 100 or so blank pages that go into the writing of a feature screenplay. Alas, none of them inspired vision, let alone an ear for character.

In 2001, when Robert McKee came to AFTRS (the Australian Film, Television & Radio School) to present his legendary “medicine shows” on writing the thriller, comedy and feature drama, he managed to do little more than bequeath a lexicon of jargon that would colour and create a semblance of communication and knowledge where in fact there was almost no understanding at all. For a fortnight after his visit the school’s corridors, cafeteria and conference rooms were alive with buzzwords. “Story-arcs”, “turning points” and “inciting incidents” enlivened the discourse, or at least provided a type of delicious gravity and sophistication that had not been there before. The old language game had been renovated into a new language game – somehow more relevant and profound than what had been there before. Armed with this new jargon and encouraged by the dramatic power of a forceful and charismatic speaker, the students attacked the scripts that were being written and rewritten, produced and directed, shot and edited with a renewed sense of creative dedication. But it was just another language game, or rather a differently worded version of the old game with a sense of sophistication that was merely symptomatic of the malady of the usual mind-set in which ego, unmanaged fear and manipulation continue to inform the values of the ambitious, blind and deaf.

The screenwriter working as a medium can find no solace or encouragement in the pronouncements of those for whom story is reducible to what the writer DOES to the story ant the CHARACTERS. This sort of creative chauvinism is anathema to the mediumistic screenwriter and filmmaker. What is important is not so much what you do, but what you don’t do. To understand this better, consider for a moment the Chinese concept of Wu Wei (无为.). Wu Wei is an important tenet of Taoism that involves knowing when to act and when not to act. “Wu” may be translated as “not having” or “not possessing”; and “Wei” (2nd tone) may be translated as “action” or “doing”. The literal meaning of Wu Wei is "without action" or “no action” – a strange concept to be introducing into a dicussion about dramatic storytelling, in which action is central to its movement and meaning. Paradoxically, the application of Wu Wei to dramatic screen storytelling (or story-finding) is expressed more directly by the concept of “wei wu wei” : "action without action."

The practice of wu wei and the efficacy of wei wu wei are fundamentally the achievement of a state of perfect equilibrium, or the alignment of action with intention. In practical terms this alignment manifests as spontaneity, resulting in an irresistible form of "soft and invisible power" over things (the self, others, a country).

Spontaneity is a quality of performance - what sports people refer to when they speak of a player or a team as being “in the zone”. Mediumistic screenwriters write “in the zone”, and they do so not by force of will but by learning to act without acting.

Confucius once compared a virtuous prince to the North Pole, saying that he did not move; everything turned around him. There are magical, occult justifications behind this idea of a power obtained by 'inaction'. In the ancient Taoist texts, wu wei is often associated with water and its yielding nature. Although water is soft and weak, it has the capacity to slowly erode solid stone. Water is without will (i.e.: the will for a shape), opposing wood, stone, or any solid material that can be broken into pieces. It can therefore fill any container, take any shape, go anywhere, even into the smallest holes. When sprayed in thousands of small drops, water still has the capacity to reunite. Eventually – as is its nature – it returns to its source, to the eternal sea. Furthermore, while always going downward, water rests in the 'dark valley'—where biological life is regenerated. The creative vision of the correspondence of birth with death, youth with age, strength with weakness – the yin and the yang of our being – the situation of irony that is the story of human history – that makes truth out of existence and existence out of the irony inherent in good and evil – enlarges our understanding of the story that we are telling, which is also and equally the story that is telling us.

Several chapters of the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tze, allude to 'diminishing action', or 'diminishing will', as the key aspect of the sage's success. Taoist philosophy recognizes that the universe already works harmoniously according to its own laws; as a person exerts her/his will against the world s/he disrupts the harmony that already exists. This is not to say that a screenwriter/filmmaker should not exert will. Rather, it is how s/he acts in relation to the natural processes already extant that is critical. In terms of a story the natural processes involve more than the writer, the writer’s knowledge and the means of notating the writer’s ideas. A story’s natural processes are the actions of the characters and the sources of these actions – and the characters here referred to are not simply those characters that inhabit the screenplay, but also the character that is the story’s audience and the characters whose tribe or tribes are being dramatised by the actions of the dramatis personae.

Wu Wei has also been translated as "creative quietude," or the art of letting-be. It is evidenced in the spontaneous gestures of artists and dancers, sports persons and musicians, acrobats and actors, indeed anyone that instinctively understands the value of getting out of the way of the creative energies that move in and through them. The act of letting go or relinquishing control does not mean sloppiness or any dulling of the mind; in fact, it is the very liberation of thought, an effortlessness that does not strain to be either open or closed, interested or disinterested – it is akin to pure consciousness – a being INSIDE THE MOMENT, inside the drama, naturally open, available and responsive to one's own multifarious nature and the natures of those with whom one shares the finding that is the dramatic story played out in the actions of all of the characters.

As one diminishes doing, one diminishes all those actions committed against the Tao (read: the natures of the characters and the nature of the story itself), which already exists like the sculpture inside the uncarved stone - the already present natural harmony. As one begins to cultivate Tao (or Being), one becomes ever more in harmony with it and, according to Chuang Tze, attains a state of Ming, or 'clear seeing'.

It is in the state of Ming that the Taoist is in full harmony with Tao, and 'having arrived at this point of non-action, there is nothing that he does not do.'

It is upon achievement of this Chinese equivalent to 'enlightenment' that both the sage and the truly original and revolutionary filmmaker begin to perform wei wu wei, or 'action without action.' Thus the filmmaker – like the sage - will work in harmony with Nature to accomplish what is needed and, working in perfect harmony with the Tao, leave no trace of having done it.

“Coming to meet” is best understood as a contract made between two people. If one is indolent in performing his part, or has mental reservations about what he is willing to do, the contract may fail. Although such a person may have entered the contract without any immediate objections, his attitude may contain objections which arise only at the time his obligations are to be performed. Such a person may secretly feel that contracts are not to be taken seriously, or, on seeing how difficult it is to fulfill his part, he may hedge on doing it because of some idea that all contracts are subject to fitting into his concept of what is “reasonable.”

We must avoid egotistical enthusiasm when we think we are making progress, or discouragement when the dark period ensues. Throughout the cycle we learn to remain detached. Holding steadily to the light within us and within others. The instant we strive to influence, we “push upward blindly.” If we insist on accomplishing the goal at all costs, our inner light is darkened and our will to see things through is damaged.

Inner withdrawal is an action of perseverance that has its own reward, but only when it is modest perseverance, not an attempt to impress others by getting them to notice our withdrawal. In many situations the problem is resolved, not through any external action that arises spontaneously on our part, but by simply “letting it happen,” through letting go of the problem. Our “action” is to “let go".

YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? - Dialogue & the search for syllables to shoot at the Unknown

2011-04-01T12:42:00.000+11:00

"I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired.” - Francis Ford Coppola

Most young screenwriters I meet have an almost obsessional aversion to dialogue. Some will even go to the extreme of avoiding it altogether, and if asked why, a not uncommon reply might be something like: “better silent than cheesy”, as if those were the only choices.

A good deal of the dialogue I read in most of the scripts that come my way is invariably tortured, artificial and frequently unnecessary. But this doesn’t mean that dialogue per se is something better left out of your screenplay. Rather than avoiding it, a more constructive and potentially more creative response would be to ask the question: what must one do in order to write dramatic speech that sounds natural and at the same time multiplies the dramatic values of the action?

Dramatic dialogue is NOT like every day speech, no matter how realistic the best of it may sound. The writer, Paddy Chayevsky, who composed some of the most realistic and memorable film dialogue ever written was fond of pointing out that the task of the screenwriter is not to slavishly copy spoken speech, but to write it down in such a way as to make us believe this is way people actually speak. Effective dramatic dialogue almost never presents language in the way that it is actually used. If that were the case, all a screenwriter would have to do is carry round a tape recorder and faithfully transcribe everything he recorded into notebooks to be mined later.

The Australian film editor, Bill Russo, and I often spoke about the editing that is writing and the writing that is editing. They really are much closer to each other that they are to any other of the disciplines associated with filmmaking, apart from, perhaps, music.

Scripted dialogue is edited speech, and the operative word here is EDITED. The stammering, the pauses, the "uhs," and “ahs” and "likes" that many people stick in front of or between their words, the pauses in which a speaker searches the right word or strives to exact the specific emphasis, or merely the interval or intervals in which one quietly struggles to figure out what they're going to say next, seldom appear in the text of the majority of screenplays that I read, as if such hearing was to be reserved for the directors and the actors.

When it comes to dialogue, less is usually more. This is not to say that there is never a place for monologue, but one must develop a feeling and a nose for monologue, which means one must cultivate a sensitivity to the “hidden dialogicality” (Bahktin’s phrase) of that form of address. Imagine, for example, two men – soldiers, perhaps – meeting one another prior to setting out on a dangerous mission. Imagine a dialogue between of two men in which the statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense of a dialogue is not lost. The second speaker is present but he doesn’t actually use any words. Nevertheless, owing to what we see in his demeanor and know about him from past actions and interactions, we sense the deep traces left by his unspoken words, simultaneously perceiving their determining influence on all present and visible words of the first speaker. In other words, though only one of the characters is actually speaking, we sense a conversation. And it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each and every word uttered by the first character is responsive in every way to the invisible speaker, and points to something outside itself, beyond its own limits, to the unspoken words of that character.

Now imagine this kind of dialogic going on amongst ALL of the characters, with all of their various voices and silences, as they collaborate in the dynamic interplay that is the constructing or finding a dramatic screenplay. Writer, characters, audience and tribes, all interactiing and speaking to one another in a kind of extravagant form of block play. Remember the sorts of dialogues one indulged in as a child? For children, understanding comes when they actively respond through external social speech, such as engaging in a dialogue with an adult, or in private speech by assuming the role of two or more characters and talking aloud, or through inner speech by responding internally to what has been said. As with children, so too with effective screenwriters. As I have said many times, the most impotant part of the worl screenplay is “play”.

It is not uncommon to hear a child talking to him/herself whilst in the storyworld creation of doll or block playing. In the act of constructing a double-decker bridge, for example, you might hear a child say: "It goes up here" as he places a block on the top of his structure. But Bahktin's notion of hidden dialogicality accounts for understanding and dialogue not just in block play, but also in screenwriting. When the screenwriter plays with the story, he is engaging in a set of ongoing relationships and dialogues, inner and outer, with the other participants in the story process, namely the characters, the audience and the tribe.

Certainly, most great films have at least a few if not many memorable sentences or speeches – "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," and “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” are synonymous with the films they are from. But what really makes them memorable is the context in which the words are uttered. In both of these cases, the lines are funded with an emotional charge that comes not only from the words but also from the visuals and the reactions of the other character’s operating within the scene.

Consider Johnny Depp's characterization of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni, Tod Davies and Alex Cox), for example. He is given to long, rambling speeches, but there is always something going on in the background, even if it is an hallucination. The dialogue plays off the images, alternating between comic and harrowing but reinforcing the impact for both.

Making dialogue conversational and believable resides in the small details, in the ability to hear what doesn’t need saying. In the wisdom to speak the word that evokes what can never be said. It involves rhythm and having an ear for tone, timbre and pitch.

Characters have their own, identifiable rhythms. If one knows them well enough, one feels their identity in the rhythms they make – both bodily and verbally. Training the ear and the body to listen and respond to the way people speak – on a bus, in a pub, at a party, in the act of making love – is useful so long as one trains the ear and the physical vehicles to listen and not take notes.

Nevertheless, a writer worth his or her salt will always be listening for good dialogue, to the intrinsic music and rhythm of the character that is speaking. And don't be afraid to edit and re-edit and re-edit if a section of dialogue isn't working. Go away from it and come back to it later. Sometimes one hears the right phrase in the faintest speech, like one sometimes sees the faintest star by catching it in the corner of one’s eye. Most good dialogue comes when one is NOT sitting in front of a computer. Go for a stroll; take the story, not the dog, for a walk.

If you’re going to give up “square writing” you must also be alert to every possibility of every character’s internal contradictions. Develop an instinct for grasping the multiple and oft-times hidden meanings that lurk beneath the surface of the characters’ public quests and private fears. Don’t bother making up lists. Get to know them, inside and out, watch them like you’d watch a prospective lover, confess something to them, expect them to confess something to you.

The ability to hear and appreciate subtext is instrumental to the conception and presentation of emotionally sound and compelling dialogue, which – if it is to be potent – is never that obvious. Ham-fisted subtext is not an oxymoron but it is moronic. It’ll set your audience to laughing and you to tears. Don’t curry favour with, or indulge the desires of, the three bastard muses. Sentimentality, propaganda and pornography (or scatological discourse) are ultimately of little use to you unless you’re first love is advertising.

Subtext – when effective – invites the audience to become participants in the creation of the story and in that participation to feel an intimacy with the characters that renders them fully present.

At the end of Rushmore (written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson), while Jason Schwartzman as Max and Olivia Williams as Miss Cross dance, they have the following exchange:

Max: Yeah, it went okay. At least nobody got hurt.
Miss Cross: Except you.
Max: No, I didn't get hurt that bad.

During the play, which serves as the climax of the movie, Max is injured physically. Of course, with subtext, the audience understands his reference to emotional pain. This understanding forges an emotional connection between the audience and the character that would not be there without the engagement offered by the “reading” of the subtext.

There is usually a through-line (the spine, or driving force) that applies both to stories and to characters. The impetus to action, the pursuit of salvation or justice or love – which propels story and character along from one action to the next. But within every obsession or compulsion are many angels and many demons, and there is really no credible way of getting to either unless one does so obliquely, through what is NOT said and NOT show, but implied in context and subtext. Most screenwriters would do well to remember David Trottier’s advice in The Screenwriters’ Bible: "Let your characters keep their secrets as long as they can."

Another thing to remember is that dialogue is written to be spoken. Always read dialogue out loud. Read it back, have others (preferably in a workshop with other writers or actors) read it aloud as well. Listen to the rhythms, the tone, the syntax – FEEL it bodily – the way the words come off the tongue, the facial gestures that accompany the words, the breath – all of these are clues to the veracity of the music that is dramatic speech.

SCREENWRITERS AT WORK - Billy Marshall Stoneking talks to Suzanne LaGrande

2011-03-22T17:07:00.000+11:00

Writer/teacher, Suzanne LaGrande, recently conducted an interview with writer/producer/mentor, Billy Marshall Stoneking. Here is a podcast of excerpts from that conversation in which Billy addresses some of the salient ideas that compose his revolutionary "take" on dramatic screen storytelling.

Visit Suzanne LaGrande's website at http://suzannelagrande.com/

LET'S DO LUNCH!

2011-03-20T10:45:00.000+11:00

NOW AVAILABLE ON SKYPE!!

Informal script consults

with Billy Marshall Stoneking

In the course of writing your next film, there will be times when all you really want is someone you can sit down and talk to about the story, the characters and the process. You don't want a script editor or an exhaustive assessment; you don't want someone who's going to tell you it's great simply because they're your partner or because they like you. What you want is an honest-to-god conversation with someone that understands drama and the journey and terror of writing a dramatic screenplay, someone with whom you can air your anxieties concerning what you're doing, and who will assist you in uncovering some of the as-yet-undiscovered possibilities concerning the story that is trying to get itself told. If you're feeling lost in the project or doubting its worth, or suddenly lacking in the confidence you need to finish the next draft, book yourself in for a conversation and a coffee.

The popularity and success of this informal and inspiring approach to script development has already been phenomenal. Satisfaction guaranteed or you pay NOTHING. So, let's do lunch, eh? and talk about it.

Writers and writer/directors, producers, and others with a project at any stage of development are invited to book a consult now.

VENUE (in Sydney Australia) : Fundamental Food Co., Glebe Point Road, Glebe (across from Cornstalk Books) Mondays - Fridays (by appt only)

SKYPE (local & international writers) / SKYPE ID: billy.marshall.stoneking

PHONE sessions by appt.

Enquiries & bookings: stonekingseminars@hotmail.com

Special rate: Only $50 per hour

Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!!

For more details about Stoneking and Stoneking's range of Script Services, go to http://www.wheresthedrama.com/scriptservices.htm

A WORLD WELL TOLD

2011-03-13T11:42:00.000+11:00

Three hundred years ago, most people on the planet were largely unaware of any reality other than the one into which they were born. Now, owing to the global spread of electronic technology and the speed by which we are able to navigate physical and virtual reality, we are ever more cognizant of other "readings" of human experience. Turn on your television or computer and you immediately invite the possibility of a cultural confrontation. The "culture wars" that Fox celebrates and warns us about are symptomatic of a psychical claustrophobia, a disquieting xenophobia that infects and terrorises all those who are either unwilling or unable to navigate the drama arising from the apparent disconnect betwen "us and them". In light of this, one's resilency and openess to change is a strong determining factor in how well one manages the fear as well as the intolerance that arises from the myriad cultural confrontations one encounters on an almost daily basis.

The novelist, Chaim Potok, speaking to a fledging writer, once remarked: "If you know how your story ends before you write it, why write it? For Potok, one uncovered a story in a way not dissimilar to the way in which one journeyed through unexplored territory. This is particularly the case for the screenwriter. Anyone that has made the emotional journey demanded by a dramatic screenplay understands the role character plays in the finding of an original, surprising and emotionally compelling story. A rigorous honesty lies at the heart it, an honesty that admits one's own ignorance. It makes no sense to undergo the travail of all that suffering (writing) if you already know where all possible destinations are located, and what they mean. When scriptwriting becomes nothing more than target shooting, why bother? Unless you like target shooting. Unfortunately, when screenwriting is redued to hitting plot points the resulting action is usually predictable and stale. The vision of what we possess and what we don’t possess, of what is ours and what is not ours, of what is and what isn’t, is essential to the becoming of any story-finder; it is the essence of what it means to be human. That, and the courage and fortitude to reach into the unknown and let the unknown reach into us, is what story is all about.

As for cultural confrontation, the kind that impacts on us the most is the one that strikes us at our core – the kind of confrontations that Huck Finn continually experiences when he and Jim pull their raft over to the bank and head up towards the lights of civilised society – a society that has very little in common with the meandering dream of the river. It is in the nature of this kind of confrontation – when it occurs in our lives – that it sometimes promotes a herd or mob mentality - as witnessed by the lynching party in its confrontation with Colonel Sherburne in Twain's timeless novel. It also, occassionally, provides the impetus for Huckelberry Finn. And notable acts of sellessness and bravery within human societies.

Such confrontations are quite often an inspiration to the telling of great stories. Indeed, it is this kind of confrontation – a core confrontation – that informs the action of almost every enduring dramatic screenplay and play.

Great stories are the outward manifestations of outer and inner journeys - and, when dramatic, present the invasion of one world by another, of one belief system by another, of one value system by another. What we so carelessly refer to as DRAMATIC CONFLICT is the enactment of a core confrontation - the sort of conflict that necessitates deliberate and immediate action and defines and confirms the identity of the characters and the significant meaning of their actions..

Dramatic screenplays are neither blueprints nor maps. Borrowing an idea from Ezra Pound - they are instances of "periplum" : wanderings in which one sights land "not as it looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing." One does not so much write a drama as ENTER it. You walk around in the story world and when the going is good, its characters walk around in you. You find yourself intersecting with them at the same emotional level at which they intersect with each other.

Dramatic screen stories that work are possessed of character. The actions of the characters (as expressed in a screenplay) have voice, as do the words that the characters speak. The "voice" of the screenplay is itself a character. It has attitude. Its phrasing either brings us closer to the emotional lives of the characters or frustratingly impedes a more intimate involvement. Language is character becasue the "languaging" of every dramatic screenplay is conducted solely by characters - the writer as character; the audience as character, and the writer's tribe or tribes as character. One might say it's characters all the way down.

As storytellers we act and interact as one character among many, mostly by listening to them. At times what we hear gives rise to a successful (i.e.: emotionally compelling) screenplay. In snatches of speech and image, we work in concert with them to imagine and plot the actions, mutually playing out the "what ifs" and the "how comes", testing and exploring our incipient understandings of the dramatic problems and questions as well as the obstacles, beliefs, needs, fears, and values that drive us all. The ultimate outcome of this is a story, which on one level is simply the illumination of the nature of a process of transformation, the death of one state of being and the birth of another. If the story has a happy ending, it invaribly involves a healing; if an unhappy ending, the recognition that loss is mitigated by the nobility and the awareness that someone fought the good fight, and that there was nothing more that could have humanly been done.

The interactions of ALL the characters are played out both within and outside the script. The community of characters set within space and time and focused on a central problem gives rise to the story world. A dramatic story is a world that binds these characters together and lends meaning to their actions and discoveries. The telling and receiving of stories is akin to the Aboriginal notion of "walkabout" – a journey of initiation, a quest – the leading out of childhood (ignorance) into adulthood (wisdom, awareness). A dramatic story - framed in the form of a screenplay - is about movement, it is about walking the territory - the outer and inner territory of character as conducted by a camera in the eyes of a poet. It is about the storyteller becoming present to the characters just as the characters become present to the storyteller. It is about making that world PRESENT - a journey in the divine sense, where travel means to see, to hear, to change.

"Travel makes distance possible.

"The inspired traveller realises – intuitively – that to partake in any genuine odyssey is not to travel through a hundred lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred pairs of eyes.

"By way of story we come to understand what travel really is.

"Genuine travelling is not the overcoming of distance, but the discovery of distance, which is really the discovery of difference."

(James Carse from Finite and Infinite Games)

It may not be immediately obvious, but all men and women are brothers and sisters in a world well told. In a world well told, whether it be the outer world of society and culture, or the inner world of spirit and mind (or both), we, along with the characters, are provoked into making a journey that lies beyond the circle of the known, beyond the boundaries of what is immediately past - to hear, to see, to FEEL, to re-member ALL those worlds that have contributed, will contribute and are contributing to making us what we are. In the experience of adversity and the need to defend or fight for what they believe in, or value or love, dramatic characters - including the screenwriter - come face-to-face with their own doubts, and guilt. They reach out touching death, touching nothingness, and in the reaching discover an antidote for the meaningless that might otherwise overwhelm them.

It is not the business of a screenplay, let alone film drama, to lecture its audience, though one can always find examples of cinema-as-propaganda (e.g.: Triumph of the Will, Birth of A Nation). In seeking to effect an emotional response in your audience you must first of all engage emotionally with the characters, eschewing all acts of manipulation. One cannot employ a story's characters merely as mouthpieces for imparting one's personal grievances, especially when the information concerns issues to which one's audience is not emotionally tuned. The internet does a much better job of that. Fact is, finding dramatic stories has almost nothing to do with knowledge. Only a screenwriter that is not threatened by the posssibilities of his/her characters and is not persuaded to take refuge in cliche and formula, can achieve the degree of openess that permits the full and thoroughly credible particicipation of the characters in the story that wants to get itself told. The acceptance of the characters and one's respect for their essential integrity is required if the story-finder is to discover those actions through which the story invades our being.

A story has power. not because it tells the audience what it doesn't know, but because it expresses something that the audience knows all too well, but had never thought of expressing in just that way. Every dramatic story that works its magic, that effects significant and surprising changes and discoveries both inside the narrative and between the narrative and the audience, does so by cultivating and promoting a sense of identification, a sense of belonging, in which love is never completely absent. This cannot happen unless this sense of sonnectedness - of resonance - has first occurred in the relationship between the writer and the characters. When a story works, the emotional energies that it generates causes us to care about what is happening, and to empathise with, or at least understand, the strivings of the characters. This caring is fundamental if the story is to matter.

Our acknowledgement and appreciation of difference is both the beginning and the end of all our discoveries. It is only by virtue of the characters' differences, laid bare by their actions and interactions that we come to see the ironies that are at play below the surface of ehat is visual and audible. The differences that exist among the characters are echoed in the contradictions that exist within them. Without such contradictions subtext is impossible.

In our emotional involvement with a diversity of characters, pitted not only against one another but, at times, against themselves, we - screenwriters and filmmakers - come to see and accept (or tolerate) those untold, hidden aspects of ourselves, and the contradictions that we too must struggle against or imaginatively conduct if we are to be an energetic and ingenious contributor to the unfolding drama. Swept along by a compelling story, initiated into the emotional life of other tribes by characters that embody aspects of ourselves, the experience of I-LIKE-YOU becomes possible.

Great screenplays take the chaos of human experience and illuminate it, shaping it into an emotional logic that subrates our prejudices and whatever mean-spirited pettiness it might enshrine. Through the vivid dramatisation of core confrontations (drama) a screenplay inspires that quality of vision that is synonymous with respect - the act of "looking again", of seeing rather than merely looking.

The core confrontations that make us US are the stuff of drama, and when we experience such confrontations in a well told screen story or film, far from being mesmerised by the vision, we and the audience find courage and strength and renewed hope. In short, we are moved. Hearing and seeing what is true is invariably moving. Someone has actually presented something that speaks to what is alive in us, and is itself alive. The freshness of such an experience, the boldness of it, renews and encourages a sense of genuine connectedness - a feeling that in our aloneness we are not altogether alone. Truth made new - perhaps this is the ultimate goal of every dramatic story, not to mention every work of art.

But what is it that we actually care about when a story makes us care?

I would submit that it is a clearer vision of ourselves. Certainly, conflict - or disconnection - is the life of dramatic action. But conflict only has meaning within the context of the possibility of belonging, and a struggle to belong, to heal, to overcome. Fragmentation lacks poignancy unless there is both the possibility of, and a desire for, change, which is the journey - the odyssey from disunity to unity, from sickness to health, from death to life.

Our encounters with other, seemingly different worlds, began at an early age. Most of us were most likely bombarded with alternate ways of thinking [about] what it means to be human. In the some times violent and blind interactions that took place, we began to wrestle with the first great personal question of our lives: what does it mean to be "me"? or "What am I?" It is a question sourced in everything that is most comforting and most painful to us, it derives from everything that fills us with dread and horror, and is at the same time the basis of all our freedom. It seems too glib to say there is nothing to fear, but in one's better moments - when one actually tastes the freedom - one suspects it might be possible, or even true. Nevertheless, there is a strange and unexpected good fortune in confronting and questioning those ideas we have held as sacred, unassailable truths. Indeed, such action is essential if one is to avoid stagnation and a life of opaque routine. This is particularly the case if you are to live and work creatively. If one is to become a relevant and courageous storyteller and filmmaker it must become second nature. To cultivate a passionate and inspired doubt is the essence of faith. For unless we find constructive and creative ways of remaining ever open and enthusiastic about whatever it is that challenges our carefully constricted and ever-so-safe sense of what it means to belong, we will surely die a slow and melodramatic death.

Enduring screen stories cannot be told from the perspective of a perfectly secure and familiar world. They might start there, but the journey you must make as a myth-maker - as a carrier of the wisdom of one's tribe or tribes - by dramatic necessity must take you far beyond your comfortable habits of thought and self-satisfied prejudices. Making it new does not mean coming up with new-fangled ideas about how to format a script, or devising novel and clever templates for structuring dramatic action.

Dramatic action drives the emotional energy of every successful screenplay. But a screenplay or script is not the only field of struggle. The action that plays itself out inside the script is also being played out in the relationships that are external to the script, namely in the necessarily adversarial relationship taking place between screenwriter and audience. The changes that occur as a result of the interactions and emotional experiences of the characters in the script are echoed in the interactions occurring among ALL the characters, including the writer's relationships with his/her tribe or tribes.

Ironically, the story experience is the "mutually assured construction" of all of the characters necessary for finding the story, a construction that ultimately transforms both the writer and the audience. The sense of empathy that is built through the writer's identification with and participation in the struggles of the characters inside the story, works to initiate the audience into the emotional life of the tribal world or worlds inhabited by those characters, including the writer that is disguised as "the screenwriter". Only then does the vision that "I am LIKE them and they are LIKE me" become possible.

To experience this vision is to apprehend, as if for the first time, the seemingly strange and ofttimes unsettling fears of a screenplay's characters, and to realise that their anxieties are intimately connected to our own. That what is hidden in them is hidden in us, and that the source of their Being is in some mysterious way connected to those aspects of our own secret origins. To experience this is to begin to understand how the source of our BEING is not ours alone, but what we hold in common, not only with the characters but with all human beings. This understanding is the work and the outcome of myth, and the struggle to create and recreate myth is the drama that informs all those activities and actions by which myth comes to life.

We inhabit and are inhabited by characters that speak with a thousand different voices. To find them YOU must make the inner and outer journey. The writing of the script is a finding more than a making. One makes the journey (with the characters) in order to find oneself in that world. The process itself is both the Grail and the Fleece, and more. The journey is the dramatic search for the sacred stone upon which the particular legend and truths of the storyteller's tribe or tribes are eternally enacted - what the Aborigines have called a "tjuringa", a dreaming. The quest to find it is a vision quest that calls us beyond the chalk circle of self, that requires us to open ourselves to the possibility that we inhabit and are inhabited by other selves, other worlds, other realities.

AN OPEN LETTER FROM JAFAR PANAHI

2011-02-23T09:40:00.000+11:00

On the occasion of the Opening of the 61st Berlinale

The world of a filmmaker is marked by the interplay between reality and dreams. The filmmaker uses reality as his inspiration, paints it with the color of his imagination, and creates a film that is a projection of his hopes and dreams.

The reality is I have been kept from making films for the past five years and am now officially sentenced to be deprived of this right for another twenty years. But I know I will keep on turning my dreams into films in my imagination. I admit as a socially conscious filmmaker that I won’t be able to portray the daily problems and concerns of my people, but I won’t deny myself dreaming that after twenty years all the problems will be gone and I’ll be making films about the peace and prosperity in my country when I get a chance to do so again.

The reality is they have deprived me of thinking and writing for twenty years, but they can not keep me from dreaming that in twenty years inquisition and intimidation will be replaced by freedom and free thinking.

They have deprived me of seeing the world for twenty years. I hope that when I am free, I will be able to travel in a world without any geographic, ethnic, and ideological barriers, where people live together freely and peacefully regardless of their beliefs and convictions.

They have condemned me to twenty years of silence. Yet in my dreams, I scream for a time when we can tolerate each other, respect each other’s opinions, and live for each other.

Ultimately, the reality of my verdict is that I must spend six years in jail. I’ll live for the next six years hoping that my dreams will become reality. I wish my fellow filmmakers in every corner of the world would create such great films that by the time I leave the prison I will be inspired to continue to live in the world they have dreamed of in their films.

So from now on, and for the next twenty years, I’m forced to be silent. I’m forced not to be able to see, I’m forced not to be able to think, I’m forced not to be able to make films.

I submit to the reality of the captivity and the captors. I will look for the manifestation of my dreams in your films, hoping to find in them what I have been deprived of.

__________________________________________________

For more details about Jafar and the injustice that besets him and so many other good people in Iran, view this video:
http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/festivalprofil/berlinale_themen/openletterpanahi.html

TWO - A Documentary Film by Maya Newell

2011-02-20T10:18:00.000+11:00

NOT TO BE MISSED!!!

"The Child is father to the Man."

Julian spends a weekend in an adult baby nursery to celebrate his 2nd birthday (for the 46th time). This is an expose of a secret personal world of adult babies, with the focus on an eccentric middle aged British man with a furry fetish, who is locked into a continual state of wanting to be a two year-old girl. Pampered by a consenting nanny, it's a world of fantasies, role playing, dress-ups, imaginary friends, auto-generated personae, and regressive excursions into a victimless human pseudophilia where the object of desire is the younger internalised version of the same self, and a nostalgia for original love.

SCREENWRITER: Maya Newell
PRODUCER: Maya Newell
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Maya Newell

SCREENING AT the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival
http://tix.adelaidefilmfestival.org/session3.asp?sn=Two

Wed 2 Mar 5:00 PM F4 New Talent Showcase Palace 7
Sat 5 Mar 5:00 PM F4 New Talent Showcase Palace 3

DIRECTOR PROFILE:

Maya Newell’s film Lacuna won Best Fiction at the Robin Anderson film awards in 2005 and was selected for the NSW Young Writers’ Fellowship. She graduated from Sydney Film School, where she was the recipient of the 2006 Robin Anderson Scholarship. Her documentary, Richard: The Most Interestingest Person I’ve Ever Met was selected for the Marché du film at Cannes 2007 and was the winner of Best Director for Documentary at the Asian First Film Festival. In 2009, Maya graduated from University of Technology Sydney/University of Westminster, London. During the past year, she has been working in London at Firecracker Films and as an assistant director Canadian filmmaker, Yung Chang.

STOP PRESS!!!
Maya Newell wins Outstanding New Documentary Talent at AIDC

[Mon 07/03/2011 10:12:18]
By Amanda Diaz

Maya Newell has taken out the 2011 F4 Award for Outstanding New Documentary Talent for her documentary Two.

The award was presented by Australian International Documentary Conference director Joost den Hartog on the closing night of the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival.

Two was one of the four finalists selected from around 80 entries from up and coming documentary filmmakers. The film focuses on a middle-aged British man with a furry fetish living in an adult nursery outside of London.

According to F4 Jury President Gil Scrine the decision to award the prize to Two was unanimous.

"It was closely observed yet discreet and powerful in its simple depiction of this quite bizarre and little known corner of the human condition," he said.

The documentary won the Audience Choice Award at last year's Sydney Underground Film Festival.

Newell is best known for her award-winning 2006 film Richard: The Most Interestingest Person I've Ever Met

THE MAKING OF REAR WINDOW

2011-02-04T17:41:00.000+11:00

This is a look at the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window and how it was brought to the screen. From Pre-Production, to the famous set, to the premiere, Hitchcock's entertaining classic has a very interesting story behind it. (You may want to check out the film before you read this.

The Making of Rear Window

THE CONTRACT - JUNE 1953 WITH PARAMOUNT

-Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock became the sole owners of the film and received an initial payment for their services for $200,000

-Stewart became one of the first actors to defer his salary for a percentage of this films profit, which is now common today.

THE SET

-Took over a month to build

-At the time the set was the largest indoor set built at Paramount Studios

-The set was 25% of the entire budget, compared to 12% for the cast. (The budget was roughly set at 1 Million dollars)

-1,000 giant arc lights were needed to light the set from overhead while more than 2000 other miscellaneous lamps were necessary for supplemental lighting. The bill for lighting came close to 100,000 (95,584)

.-All of the sound in the film is diegetic, meaning that all the music, speech and other sounds all come from within the world of the film.

PRODUCTION
-Production opened on November 27

-Camera shots were extremely difficult given the distance from Jimmy Stewart’s window to across the way. These point of view shots were first shot with a ten inch lens, but it was unclear to see certain objects (Jeff using his long camera lens to focus on Thorwald retrieving his wife’s wedding wing. So they got rid of the lens and Hitchcock used a six inch model and compensated for the loss of magnification by placing a camera on a boom outside Jeff’s apartment. (Adjustable metal arm, attached to a firm stand, on which lighting can be mounted. Some booms are also made to support cameras.)

-Hitchcock controlled the action across the courtyard by means of a short-wave radio installed in Jeff’s apartment. The actors across the way wore flesh-colored earphones with frequencies tuned in to the shortwave signal. The actors had to nail every shot perfectly because the cameras long lenses had such a shallow depth of field; focus would be lost if an actors movement varied a few inches either way. During the shoot Georgine Darcy, who played "Miss Torso", "lived" in her apartment all day, relaxing between takes as if really at home.

-Lighting was an issue. They needed to borrow so many lights (from Columbia and MGM) that at one point the heat became so intense it set off the entire sprinkler system. Fortunately, a drainage system had been installed to prevent flooding during the night scenes in which it rains.

-Hitchcock even under these incidents managed to keep his cool, and focused on what needed to be done.

JEFF’S FALL
So they started with the end and ended with the beginning. They wanted to make sure that all pieces were in place for Stewart to improvise the scene just right.

The filming moved along smoothly covering four to seven pages of script a day.

POST PRODUCTION
Principal Photography ended on January 13^th although crew continued photographic inserts, trailers, and retakes. The final cut came on March 22^nd where at the time the musical score could be placed in.

OVERALL
The release of the film premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theater on August 4^th and the Hollywood premiere came a week later. Reviews were more than solid and The Box office was very solid as it made 5.3 million in rentals which was the fifth best of the year. As being a critical darling and a box office success, it garnered four Oscar nominations (writing, directing for Hitchcock, sound recording and cinematography though was shut out from winning any)

_____________________________________

Thanks to Casey LaMarca

http://www.caseylamarca.com/rear_window_7.html

THE POWER OF THE SONG

2011-02-02T09:41:00.000+11:00

I remember a late-night poetry reading at Sydney's Café Labsurd more than twenty years ago. The usual after-hours crowd was there – mainly other poets, and their boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, as well as a few hangers-on. Nothing very memorable, except that on this particular occasion three old men from the desert – elders of the Pintupi tribe – were part of the audience.

It was the first time I'd read my poetry publicly in front of tribal people which, I confess, made me a little anxious since the stuff I was reading had been drawn from my experiences living in their "country". For four years I had lived and worked among the Pintupi, writing poetry about them and about me with them; trying to make some sense of my place in their world, exploring their world with my language. Now, here I was reading in front of a city audience, and wondering what these old men would think of it all.

They didn't say anything after I'd finished, but later, coming back from a piss, I bumped into Mick Namarrari, the quietest of the three. He stopped me, took hold of my arm and then, leaning very close, whispered in my ear: "When you were talking, I was happy."

To Mick’s way of thinking I had "told it true" – no parntu, no bullshit. Exact. He patted me on the shoulder, "Good ear". It was a great compliment. In the Western Desert, the verb kurlinu means both "to hear" and "to understand".

In the four years I lived at Papunya Settlement, in the Northern Territory, I learned something about the art of storytelling… and a way of writing poetry. For poetry, in a certain sense, is the most succinct form of the story, and some of the greatest storytellers in the world live in central Australia.

But at first I didn’t know if I would be able to write anything at all. I didn’t speak or understand the local language; I knew practically nothing about Pintupi concepts of land or how resources were distributed within the community; or even how the Pintupi had come to be living in a place like Papunya. Then there was the ceremonial life with its various social and economics structures; and traditional Aboriginal law as taught through the Tingarri song cycles. It was rich, formidable, and as complex as any culture I had ever experienced.

Consider the kinship system for example. Socially and ceremonially it determines a whole range of responsibilities and obligations understood by all members of the society. It describes a highly complicated system of social organization that not only assigns roles and relationships to each individual, but to combinations of relatives. Hence, two Tjapaltjarri men (brothers) will be called by the name nyinamparra if addressed by another Tjapaltjarri man; but if addressed by a man from the Tjakamarra sub-section group, they will be referred to as wanarrpirra.

If I was going to write poetry about the Pintupi, I knew I could not ignore their beliefs and values. I had to know something, feel something, about their way of life.

Even at the best of times, it is often difficult to know how to begin to write a poem. Barring moments of inspiration where the poem almost writes itself – at least to first-draft stage – the craft of poetry is a challenging affair. As anyone who has practiced the art of poetry will tell you, there is a very fine line between the prosaic and the overly-poetic. The problems of language are also compounded when you set out using English in an environment where English is not the first language, and where the entire value structure of European culture is peripheral, only vaguely apparent in the form of dole checks, grog, and four-wheel-drives.

Add to this the divergence between black and white lifestyles and expectations, between attitudes and beliefs, and it is easy for the would-be poet to regress into romantic notions of an exotic, noble race, or – at the other extreme – a naïve, quasi-political outrage at the results of white oppression. When poetry becomes a cat-o'-nine-tails in the hands of a self-flagellating poetic masochist, the poetry invariably misses the mark. At best, it is boring; at first it’s a lie.

So where do you start?

In the beginning, I started with the people – listening to them, watching them, asking questions, making my world as accessible as possible. During my first year in Papunya it was not uncommon to have fifteen or twenty people sitting around my lounge room (that’s a living room, in American English), all coming in for air-conditioning and tea. Some would sit quietly on the couch, or in chairs reading Phantom comics; others would come to listen to cassettes or to do their washing.

This was not the way I had lived anywhere else, but Papunya was unlike any other place I’d been… and I wanted to know these people, not so much because of a desire to write about them but because I wanted to learn. The poem, "Wash Day" reflects this situation:

Monica and Victor come over to my place
to do their laundry
because there's nothing at their place.
They show up on Sunday
with faded dresses, frayed shirts
and dusty blankets,
placing them with great care
into the squat, barrel-chested wringer
(the whites unsorted from the coloreds).
I put a country’n’western record on
while the clothes and blankets squish –
S'fump S'fump S'fump –
turning the water a dull red.

In the lounge room
Monica and Victor sit in green cane chairs
sipping tea and reading comics.
We speak very little to each other.
I don’t want to scare them away –
We are trying very hard.
Our relationship has grown, so slowly –

from nothing to laundry.

"Wash Day" was written after I’d lived in Papunya for nearly two years. It reflects the kind of simple, direct observation of ordinary events that I, as a whitefella, had access to.

As a white writer, you cannot presume anything about black people – what they think, what they believe, what they know and feel. You cannot put yourself in their skin. All you can report is what they say and what they do, and how you feel about what they say and do. And if this is done well, it is enough.

A lot of the poetry I wrote during my first two years in Papunya was composed out of conversations I had with various people. These poems reflected not only what people said (usually to me), but how they said it. Tutama Tjapangarti, a Pintupi elder from south of Lake Hopkins in Western Australia, was always telling me about his country, and about what it had been like in 'olden times' before the whitefellas had moved in. His dreaming was spiney anteater, and he would frequently remind me of this fact, pointing to the bumps on his shoulders – the physical manifestation of spiney anteater dreaming. The following poem is a condensation of numerous hours pent listening to Tutama:

porkupine mine
putch
too much
porkupine mine
dreamin’
porkupine mine
ohhh properly
porkupine mine
too much
porkupine properly
kuka palya!
porkupine
cook em cook em cook em cook em
porkupine mine
too much!

The original language – Pintupi/Luritja – often crept into these poems because I liked the sound of it, and because it served as an indication of that the source of the text was, indeed, another language. Kuka palya means, literally, 'good meat', but the English translation in this case seemed wrong for the poem.

Poems that relate speech in this manner are nothing new. One of the best known poets of the Jindyworobaks, Roland Robinson, used this method to very good effect in poems like "Captain Cook" (related by Percy Mumbulla), and "Mapooram" (related by Fred Biggs). The use of reported speech is a very effective way of dealing with issues that, ordinarily, would be difficult for a white writer to address, at least in poetic form. Take for example, my poem, "The Promiscuous Old Man", which is based on a Tingarri song cycle, as told by Tutama Tjapangarti:

'It went West!'
The old man laughs as he tells me this.
It’s the end of a story
About an old man who was worried
All the time
For tjiki-tjiki –
‘He liked women.
All the time / all the time;
One night wasn’t good enough.
One woman wasn’t good enough.’
The storyteller grabs my hands
And leans over close to whisper
In my ear: ‘law! Aboriginal law!’
The story’s about this old man
Who liked women;
He loved a different kungka every night.
‘He couldn’t think straight.’
One morning he woke up –
‘karlu wiya, ngaampu wiya’ –
his sexual parts were missing.
‘They’d gone walkabout by themselves.
They couldn’t wait for him anymore!’
He tracked them for days and days,
Over sand-hills and dry lakes.
He tracked them at night
With a firestick in his hand,
But ‘that penis wasn’t going to stop;
Those balls weren’t going to sit down.’
That penis has a long ‘dreaming track’ now.
It goes a long way – West!
The storyteller sticks out his tongue
And scrunches up his nose:
'That old man –
he never did catch up!'

A recurrent theme in a lot of the poetry I wrote during the years I lived at Papunya had to do with the cultural dislocation I often felt. In a place as isolated as Papunya it is often difficult to sustain one's enthusiasm toward one's own cultural heritage. There were, in fact, some whites who carried this lack of enthusiasm to an extreme - or maybe they never had it to begin with. In their need to embrace all things Aboriginal they would indiscriminately deride, criticise and undervalue almost everything European - a case of doing away with the baby as well as the bathwater. The logic went something like this: Aboriginal culture is 40,000 years old, therefore Shakespeare sucks. One should not have to apologise for Shakespeare because his plays are only 400 years old. At any rate, it seemed that those who despised, or pretended to despise, their own culture were the same ones who had the most tenuous links to the culture they had adopted.

The two cultures did, however, produce a curious mix - and one could be excused for experiencing confusion at times. The signs and symbols of white culture, the stuff us whitefellas had grown up with, took on other dimensions, meant something entirely different, were distorted or altered entirely in the context of an Aboriginal world. Two poems may serve to illustrate this:

You Know Magic Man?

the magician who claimed
TV, stage and fame
complained
'the road to Papunya
killed me act.'
- two hundred miles of
dirt and sand
th rabbits died
from th heat

that night
he pulled corpses out of hats.

And

Sorry Business

(A B C D E F G)

He was attacked with a shovel spear.
They had been drinking.

(Answer Yes or No) Hot day.

Everyone had been drinking.

(Complete the sequence: 8, 10, 11, 13...)

The card game collapsed.
The wound was packed with ash.

(One out of twenty)

The women struck their heads with billy cans.

(Good boy!)

Blood trickled onto print dresses.
Willie Tjapananka is dead.

In the school, behind the fence,
the staff discusses
the problem of attendance.

The various juxtapositions of meaning produced by the mix of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal culture were a constant source of fascination. Life in the settlement swung between extremes - from the absurd to the deadly serious. But perhaps it only seemed this way because I invariably looked at it from the point of view of a poet. Few people, for example, found as much humour as I did in the postage stamp of lawn the whitefella next door had slaved over. On Sunday afternoons he'd come out in his swimming trunks and t-shirt, spread out his beach blanket - almost as large as the grassy patch - and sunbake.

For four years I watched the whitefellas arrive and depart. A lot of them were shocked by what they saw when they first drove in - the brokendown houses, the litter, the deserted cars upended like overgrown insects, the legs pulled off tthem. But Papunya is more than it seems. For awhile I used to think of it as Paris in negative. Here was a community of artists, dancers, actors, shamans, eccentrics, storytellers and political activists, all part of a place the significance of which stretched back to "creation times" - to "the Dreamtime". This was no dying race, but a gigantic family of individuals whose kinship system is among the most complex of human structures ever conceived.

But to say I was in awe of the people does not do them justice; and besides, that is not exactly true. You take people as you find them - some attract you and others you avoid. In this respect, at least, Papunya was the same as any place. The image of the mysterious, all-knowing, almost clairvoyant Aboriginal person is, in its way, as much a threat to the uninitiated whitefella as the stereotyped image of the hostile and unpredicatable primitive. What I tried to do in all my poetry was to emphasise the human condition that appeared common to all of us; and through that, to bring a select group of people - my friends - a little closer to my own life, and - if it worked - to the lives of others. How successful I have been in this enterprise is for others to judge.

Towards the end of my time in Papunya, it began to seem like the gap between white and black was closing - that we shared with each other more than the differences might indicate. This is the subtext that runs through most of the poetry I wrote during my last eighteen months.

Instructions for Honey Ants

Work with the end of your dress
tucked up between your legs.
Speak in whispers; laugh silently;
do not whistle. Whistling, especially,
brings bad luck. Do not be afraid
to feel where you cannot see.
Disappear into the earth
with crowbar and billy can;
go down, maybe ten feet,
If you find them there, it is better
when children are waiting.
This is marangkatja: a gift.
Love what you are after.

The impact Papunya and its people have had on my life is inestimable. It has changed everything. The poems, the work, in a sense are a way of giving back a part of what I received.

"The Dreaming does not end," the old men say; "It is not like the whitefellas' way. What happened once happens again and again. This is the power of the Song. Through the singing," they say, "we keep everything alive; through the Songs," they say, "the spirits keeps us alive."

_______________________________________

The copyright of the article "The Power of the Song" - is owned by Billy Marshall Stoneking. To request permission to re-print "The Power of the Song" please contact the author at Stoneking Seminars

To read more poems from Billy Marshall Stoneking's
collection of poems from the Western Desert, go to
Stoneking's Writings Online

JELLY'S PLACENTA - separating the sheep from the goats

2011-01-23T08:49:00.000+11:00

Jelly's Placenta, the 30-minute black satire by filmmaker/artist, Christina Conrad, is a one-off. To say that it breaks new ground would do it an injustice. It is a film that aggravates, confounds, disturbs, and undermines almost all of our conventional beliefs and expectations about short-form drama, and it does so in a thoroughly disarming manner. Conrad's film aggressively and unapologetically confronts and divides - one cannot remain indifferent in its presence.

Though its narrative structure ticks all the "right" boxes of a traditional dramatic story - PROBLEM, GOAL, PLAN - the way in which it dramatises the core emotional relationships of its three characters is thoroughly unexpected and unconventional, particularly in the way it employs language, a verbal and visual language that has been variously described as absurdist, poetic, surreal, and which has produced near riots in some of its public screenings. At a screening in Queensland that I attended, a man jumped from his seat in the closing moments of the film and began screaming "It's the Devil's work! Get rid of it! Stop it!" before turning on the audience and upbraiding them for allowing themselves to be brainwashed by the film's "sinister message".

Such outbursts, whilst not common, have occurred enough times to give one pause in downplaying the power the film has to provoke and incite the most overt reactions.

The film, which was shot on location in the director's house in Sydney Australia, is beautiful to behold. To have built an equivalent set would've cost millions, which, in fact, it did - a lifetime of Conrad's work stares back at the characters from every wall - silent watchers to the unfolding drama - masks, paintings, sculptures. Counterpointed with a horrific mechanical monkey whose final macabre appearance near the end of the film captures the mad disintegration of a relationship with breathtaking succinctness.

The camera work, which one might prematurely dismiss as amateurish, operates as a bold, unpretentious and complimentary disturbance to the psychological imbalance of the world that both we and the characters inhabit. A world that strangely lingers for quite some time after the film has had its way with us. One audience member who left the theatre stunned and slightly confused by what she had experienced, was surprised to find herself laughing out loud on a city bus one week later, having just realised what the film actually meant (to her). The film has this facility - to produce delayed reactions.

Whilst Jelly's Placenta may not be everyone's cup of tea, it does the work that far too many films avoid - to shake us at our core, to wake us from our habits, to show us something that lies beyond the template, to seduce us - the consummate fools - into stepping over the precipice.

Though not available online in its entirety, you can get a taste of the film by visiting http://christinaconrad.webs.com/films.htm and following the links to three excerpts
that have been posted on YouTube.

Here's what one audience member who didn't run screaming into the darkness had to say:

A LETTER FROM JACK FELDSTEIN

I watched Jelly's Placenta and thank Christina for giving me the DVD.

True originality is always strange to others.

In my mind, that's because while the rest of us have been greatly influenced, true originality only has itself as its reference.

Christina has made up her own language. In art. ( film, poetry, sculpture whatever).

And as opposed to being some bland, inoffensive esperanto that the rest of us have learned to communicate with...that language is unique and surprising, dangerous and ultimately exciting.

So I understand Jelly's Placenta through that prism.

And thank and recognise and admire that Christina has the guts to be exactly who she is... through her art.

Besides that, the film is certainly beautiful to look at.

Now because I am only human and susceptable to patterns...I see similarities with Matthew Barney's The Kremaster Cycle.

Has anyone else mentioned that?

JACK FELDSTEIN
filmmaker

Visit Conrad's website : PRESENTING CONRAD

THE CONFORMIST - WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

2011-01-19T10:27:00.000+11:00

The Conformist - is now showing at WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

O R I G I N S - a tribal experience for filmmakers & actors

2011-01-14T08:45:00.000+11:00

coming to Sydney in February

ORIGINS has been designed for people who want to explore the creative vision of character-based storytelling in a workshop for writers, directors, actors, consultants, producers, script editors, copywriters and others desiring to discover the ways in which their 'tribal' connections impact on and influence the stories that ARE their lives.

This is not a step-by-step 'how to' guide to writing but rather a unique and illuminating approach to developing confidence and self-awareness, especially an awareness of those stories that you have in you to tell, that make you YOU!

Through a series of interactive, learner-centred experiences, participants will discover how their life experiences inform their creative lives, and vice versa. In the process, they will become better acquainted with the inner characters and stories that are wanting to be expressed or played out creatively.

At the conclusion of the first two weekends, participants will make a short film (no longer than 5 minutes) which dramatises one of their 'Tribal Identities'. The film may be of any genre, including documentary, with the emphasis on content rather than than slick production values. These films will be screened at a final meeting, approximately four weeks after the conclusion of the final weekend session.

Areas covered:

- The art of creating a character

- Actors as mediums

- The grammar of dramatic scenes

- Fundamental dramatic relationships necessary for finding and effectively building and releasing emotional energy

- Constructive management and uses of fear in the finding and projection of character

- Strategies for exploring the outer and inner journeys of all the characters relevant to the presentation of a meaningful story

- The ORIGINAL voice

DETAILS AND BOOKINGS at
http://www.darlinghursttheatre.com/page/course_enrolments.html

THE 4 NOBLE TRUTHS & ANXIETIES

2011-01-09T11:14:00.000+11:00

(Adapted by Billy Marshall Stoneking)

1. Life is Suffering

Drama, by definition, presents and explores suffering; which is to say, it presents characters in the grip of ANXIETY.

In a dramatic story, suffering (or anxiety) is synonymous with disconnection.

Birth is suffering (disconnection from the mother).

Aging is suffering (disconnection from one’s former self, from one’s youth or one’s past).

Sickness is suffering (disconnection from health – i.e.: dis-ease, without ease).

Separation from one’s beloved is suffering.

Failure in business is suffering.

Not to get what one wants is suffering.

Drama is a present-time investigation of what humans or human-like characters do when faced with some form or another of disconnection (suffering).

2. The cause of suffering is Desire

One wants what one doesn’t have; if one had it there would be no reason to want it.

Dramatic action is largely the product of characters actively seeking ways of regaining something that has been lost or taken from them. Or the movement toward an idealised dream, a goal, a vision of human potential, their potential.

Dramatic desire = frustrated desire.

Without frustrated desire, drama is not possible.

Therefore, drama is concerned with characters that are possessed of a desire for something they do not have, and which they must satisfy short of some other terrible calamity befalling them.

3. Suffering can be overcome

Drama always involves the potential for, and the actuality of, change.

Through a character’s actions and the potency of those actions, there is hope that the suffering might be transformed or overcome.

Drama presents the journey a character makes in order to overcome or transcend the anxiety – or suffering – occasioned by the frustration of desire.

Drama allows us – as audience – to explore and find (or not find) with the character a solution to the suffering.

By way of the dramatic journey that is the story, we experience the possibility and sometimes – at least, vicariously – the actuality of hope and healing.

4. The Eightfold Path

A story-journey involves a series of choices and actions, and proceeds from beginning to middle to end along a pathway that is the character’s journey to answer a challenge, effect a healing or overcome an adversary.

The journey a character makes in order to “set things right” – to re-dress a wrong, or re-establish order, or attain some degree of balance and harmony that will ultimately lead the character to achieving his or her true desire or goal – is conducted via the eightfold path, which is composed of the following:

· Right View – The beginning and end of the journey

To see and understand things as they really are.

It may be that the “right view”, which the character possesses at the beginning of a story is sabotaged or undermined by actions of others by events that have been authored by others. What is crucial is to remember that difference characters have different agendas, which are expressed in differing plans of actions. When one character’s goal and plan of action are incompatible with another character’s goal and action conflict happens.

Conflict – or any dramatic situation or action - interrupts the “rightness” of a character’s world, forcing him or her to either capitulate (the passive character) or “fight for something” (the active character) – Dramatic character when faced with conflicts, obstacles or complications strive to find a new way of making things “right” again.

Also, the action of a dramatic story often begins with anxiety and ends with a complete understanding of the true nature of things as they pertain to issue being dramatised.

· Right Intention – Goals and plans

This involves a commitment on the part of the main character(s) to the ethical, physical and/or mental improvement of a situation. This improvement is expressed as a goal and is dramatised by the actions of the character in pursuit of that goal.

The character’s intention to achieve his/her goal manifests through what the character says and does as well as through the other characters’ reactions to what that character says and does.

· Right Speech – The power and impotence of language

“Choose your words carefully before you let them fall, lest they mar your fortune.” This is the essential wisdom that is the recognition that words can make and break lives; they can provoke enemies and encourage friends, start wars or create peace.

“Right speech” means:

1) To avoid telling deliberate lies or to speak deceitfully;

2) to avoid slanderous speech and not use words maliciously against others;

3) to eschew harsh words that offend or hurt others;

4) to abstain from idle talk that lacks purpose or depth.

· Right Action – Externalising the emotions

This involves what a character actually does. When the action a character manifests is not appropriate for achieving the desired goal, the possibilities of achieving that goal decrease.

A character’s misconduct will aggravate the disconnection that lies at the heart of the drama. However, when the main character’s actions are founded upon sound and moral principles, and when he/she acts upon a plan that acknowledges these principles, and is appropriate to the goal that that character wishes to achieve, the possibilities for obtaining that goal increase.

· Right Livelihood – Navigating the material world

A character is known by the company he keeps and by the company that keeps
him!

A character’s livelihood may have a significant impact upon the character’s ability to effect a healing, and thus overcome the problems that are causing him/her pain.

Characters can be victims of inappropriate occupations, both formal and informal – and are frequently only able to effect positive change when what they do to earn their keep recognises that good fortune and health are not usually possible short of finding them through moral and legal means.

· Right Effort – Managing Time & Action

Dramatic actions must not be idle or passive. A character becomes dramatic when his/her efforts are directed towards clear and credible goals.

To expend right effort means to act in accordance with one’s true goal, and not to indulge in misguided actions out of mere idleness or because you can’t think of anything better to do. It also refers to those actions of the main character that have the potential to transform dramatic situations in favour of increasing the character’s chances of attaining his/her goal.

· Right Mindfulness – Wisdom or the ability to “care and not to care – the ability to sit still

This involves recognising and respecting particular people (including oneself) and the situations in which they find themselves. The appreciation of a person or a situation for what it is (in its “suchness”), and not for what one hopes or wishes it might be or could be.

It is the mental energy that is the force behind right effort, which stops the character from confusing aggression and violence with righteousness and benevolence.

When a character is focused on the “here and now” and not confused or misguided by idle thoughts about “there and then”, he/she attains the lucidity that is the hallmark of right mindfulness.

· Right Concentration – The art of single-mindedness

To be utterly attentive while at the same time maintaining a calm and steady demeanour.

To have the strength not to be side tracked or distracted by actions and events that would lead one away from one’s goals.

5. The Four Anxieties

Dramatic suffering is characterised by anxiety.

The central character of the story - for whatever reason - has his/her desire frustrated. This frustration gives way to a feeling of unrest, or a sense of isolation or disconnection, or pain – that is, anxiety.

The character’s dramatic quest is to resolve the problems produced by this frustration and to overcome the anxiety that has been produced by the frustration.

In powerful and well conceived dramatic stories, the anxiety is often aided and abetted by the main character’s own belief system, which must be confronted during the course of the journey if the character is to have any hope of achieving his/her ultimate goal.

The transcending of inadequate, inappropriate or false beliefs (the “psychological wounds” of the character) is ultimately the character’s inner journey, which finds its outer manifestation in him/her realising his ultimate desire or goal.

There are four basic anxieties – each of which contains many possible sub-sets.

The four anxieties that form the basis of drama and the impetus for dramatic action are:

the anxiety of Doubt

the anxiety of Guilt

the anxiety of Death

and

the anxiety of Meaninglessness

THE MEXICO INTERVIEW

2011-01-05T13:33:00.000+11:00

This is a transcript of an extensive interview conducted by expatriate American poet, Charles Hasty, in conversation with Billy Marshall Stoneking, during the latter’s first lengthy sojourn in Mexico in 1994. The two poets met at Hasty’s home in the village of San Miguel de Allende, where Charles resided with his wife, Dorothy. San Miguel's connection with both film and poetry is unusual, even bizarre. As well as being home to several expatriate poets and writers, including W.D. Snodgrass and Alice Denham, it hosts an annual poetry festival that has attracted the likes of Robert Haas and Yusef Komunyakaa. It was also where Kerouac's hero, Neal Cassidy, was run over and killed by a train, and has been used in many film productions as a location, including Disney's The Littlest Outlaw.

At the time of this interview, Charles was editor of the well-known publication, The San Miguel Writer, and Billy was in the midst of researching his play, Eisenstein in Mexico. Hasty is the author of the much acclaimed, Poems of the Long Man, a bi-lingual (English/Spanish) collection of his poetry published by the University of Sinaloa Press.

We join the interview after introductions have been made and the Bloody Marys have been poured...

Charles Hasty: So, how would you describe your primary approach to poetry?

Billy Marshall Stoneking: Listening. Listening to what's going on around me. What others are saying and what I'm saying to them, both verbally and non-verbally. It's amazing what you hear when no one's mouth is open. I am fascinated with the way sounds and silences rub up against one another. If I'm gonna make notes for a poem, this is invariably the source.

CH: And what sort of poetry do these notes produce?

BMS: All sorts. Poetry is the world. Whenever a young or beginning writer asks me, "what can I write about?” I always say: listen to your world... what's going on around you? The so-called everyday and ordinary world that is taken for granted might be very remarkable, even miraculous, to one whose ears are tuned to it. Imagine... poems by mothers writing down what their children say; poems by people who write down what their work-mates complain about on a Monday morning. I know a poet in Melbourne - Grant Caldwell - who’s written a whole group of poems about riding city buses - the interactions between the driver and passengers, between himself and the passengers, between the passengers and one another. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? One just climbs onto a bus or goes to one’s office or workplace and tape records everything that's said, then goes home and transcribes it. But that’s not how it happens. One has to know how to shape the material. If you don’t know WHAT you’re listening to, I mean, if you don’t know HOW to edit it, which means understanding the WHAT and the WHY of it, then you don’t have anything but a whole bunch of tapes with gabbling on them. It’s the editing that stamps it with your own, unique perspective, your own point of view. It's the editing that makes it your own, taking a bit of this, throwing out a bit of that, and here and there your own voice starts coming into it, your own way of breaking up the syntax and making the images resonate. You shape it to your ear, as Pi O, the Melbourne poet, does. As any poet, who really is a poet, does. A poet catches the voices that are all around him and in him.

CH: Isn’t this a major occupation for writers?

BMS: Yes, it’s not that rare a thing, really.

CH: Having written a play about Ezra Pound, would you say he engaged language in such a way?

BMS: Waaall... (laughs)... Yes. Pound definitely. He did it all the time. He’d frequently slip into a kind of folksy idiomatic speech that probably came out of his continuing identification with his backwoods heritage, and listening to people from all sorts of different backgrounds, whose voices interested him. Some were just plain folks, or his notion of plain folks, and some were very powerful politicians, but he frequently gave you the idioms of their voices, rather than simply paraphrase what they were saying. Pound uses lots of voices, lots of language, lots of speech.

CH: In The Cantos, yes, but I’m thinking about Personae. He seemed to be looking for special voices that fit into his concepts of poetic form and plain good writing.

BMS: This was a man who spent his entire life looking for his voice. This is why he made so many experiments with different voices. Personae is an excellent example of this. He’s trying out all these voices. And you know, he’s reading them in the original languages and then making translations. They are attempts to bring into the 20th century the spirit of what those people were saying three, four, five hundred years earlier, as with the troubadours. But in many ways, Pound was as much the editor as he was the poet. Most of his poems, with the exception of the Pisan Cantos, have been rigorously researched. One some times has the impression that he is writing them in the midst of a huge library, delving into the most amazingly esoteric texts, in some cases, hauling out bits of information, reworking them in his own way. It’s the same kind of editing process I was talking about before. If one looks at Pound’s work on Eliot’s Wasteland – I mean, the poem would not be as we know it, would never have been the masterpiece we know, without Pound’s editing.

CH: Why do you write poetry?

BMS: Not for money, that’s for sure.

CH: You write mainly for yourself, or for an audience?

BMS: I love audiences but they have very little to do with my writing. Mostly, I write out of myself, for myself. It's my way of revealing myself to myself. It's about self-revelation, self-discovery. "Going where no man has gone before!" (laughs) My experience of living in the desert, for example - four years in Central Australia with tribal Aboriginal people. In the beginning I wasn’t able to write anything; it was all so strange, so foreign. I felt blind, deaf. But after I’d been there for about a year I became more and more restless... I wanted to place my experiences, put them in some kind of shape that would reveal how I was being affected by the place. I had to place myself, to deal with the what and the why. What I am, who I am, HERE!! The people in Papunya wanted their children to learn how to read and write, and so I'd been employed to assist in creating a library, a collection of books written in the local dialect. But all the time I kept thinking about how this was gonna impact upon the culture, and I knew it wasn’t all going to be positive. Of course, I knew that the community had requested it, but I still wondered about the repercussions it might have. And so I was always asking myself these questions. Was I doing enough, or too much? Am I part of the solution or more of the same old problem? And are these even the right questions? If one is "white" in that situation, one cannot morally exist outside of a constant state of doubt. I mean, us whitefellas, we lived liked millionaires compared to how the Aborigines were living. We had air-conditioned houses, and they slept under sheets of corrugated iron, sleeping on the ground. For some one as new and middle class as I was then, these were big questions. So the writing was my way of coming to terms with the contrasts and doubts and my own feelings of displacement... to try to make some kind of sense out of some of the things I was feeling about being there. And they didn’t come easily. The poems, I mean. A lot of the poems I wrote in those early days were absolute crap. They were the sort of thing that you write when you’re not sure what you’re gonna write. When you're not really listening to what's going on around you. The first really good poem I wrote just came out, just fell out, after I'd been there nearly a year and a half. The one called "Wash Day". "Monica and Victor come over to my place to do their laundry, because there’s nothing at their place...". That was a real revelation. The simplicity and matter-of-factness of it took my breath away. It had the same simplicity of speech I found among the people themselves. Simple but unusually eloquent.

CH: I’d like to know your reaction to this kind of presentation. A poem that begins with, say, the sound of birds – as well as human speech can imitate such sounds – but it is put into strict iambic pentameter. Would you consider this sort of practice frivolous?

BMS: It’s all frivolous! That's the glory of poetry and art! Frivolous in terms of the world, I mean. This imitative aspect – it’s great fun, even when metrically exact. And there’s no reason why poetry shouldn’t be fun. In Australia, there’s a whole school or group of poets who are creating what they call "sound poetry", people like Peter Murphy and the late Jas H Duke. This is nothing new, mind you. It's as old as speech. You see children on a sidewalk... I passed a boy in San Miguel the other day that was standing in an open doorway saying "blah-up blah-up blah-up", over and over again. Just making nonsense sounds. He was in a kind of trance and thoroughly enjoying it. Artaud experimented with his own language in making sounds that were very personal to him, but which he felt transcended logic and analysis and struck at the heart of the subconscious. This sort of thing, I think, is very exciting, and extremely evocative. It calls our attention to the fact that meaning is not just an affair of definitions or some kind of logical word order. It is more than syntax and semantics. Meaning is an affair of burps, hiccups and silence. Nonsense syllables have an emotional weight, an emotional value. A baby crying, for example. A lot of poets who write for the page, simply for the page (I’m talking about people who sit in a room with a typewriter or word processor and write a poem silently to themselves) – that’s a very different kind of writing than writing a poem to be read aloud and conscious of the fact that its ultimate manifestation will be the spoken voice. Poems have music; the words and the sound-codes score the voice. And it's all about play, really. I mean, I never realized the meaning of The Cantos until I heard Pound recite two or three of them one night on the radio. Then I realized that hardly anyone knew how to read them. They'll read this word, and that word, and the next word, word after word, but the whole flow of language isn't there. The "sentence sounds" that Frost talks about. The music. When Pound reads he actually sings the poems and, suddenly, they have this entirely different sense about them.

CH: Is it right to simply say someone is writing to the page, somebody sitting alone? What is really wrong with that? I wouldn’t want to throw out a whole bunch of people because they were writing to the page. Dickinson seemed quite alone. Mallarme used the visual aspects, the white spaces on the page and so on...

BMS: Look, I think a poem, a good poem, can have quite a happy and useful life on the page. History proves this. But a good poem lives in both the print and the voice! Only we have forgotten about the voice, mostly. We lived in a print-tyrannized age. The voice is so often neglected, especially in our educational institutions.

CH: Neglected?

BMS: Performance poetry, as it is called, has been neglected by academia for years... Most academics sneer at it, or pay it dismissive lip-service in the guise of doing honour to Homer, etc. One of the reasons for this is because the vast body of performance poetry is bad poetry - just like the vast majority of written poetry is bad. Look, there are a great many poems – bits of writing that are called poems – which don’t work on the page, and no matter how much enthusiasm you put into reading them aloud it’s not gonna make them any better. But if the poem works aloud, if the writer or interpreter of the poem has found how to communicate that poem orally ... if he has made the "what" and the "why" his own ... and if it has emotional impact on the people who listen to it, then I believe that poem has found its full, most direct expression. And you'll be able to find it in the writing as much as in the sounds. The thing I hate is when people come up to poets who have given a great reading and say: "You made those poems sound better than they really are." How many people came up to Shakespeare or Chehkov? I agree, you can make a poem sound worse than it is, through ignorance of the text, or by a lack of skill in recitation, all sorts of ways. But if you are able to make it work, to make it sing, it doesn’t mean that you made it better than it is; it means you have found what it is that works in the poem, made it your own, and given it its full voice.

I’ve seen performance poets get up and you know, they roll their eyeballs and stick out their tongues and blurt out a stream of scatological nonsense, and you just go Ho-Hum – Yawn – Next! No matter how hard they try it’s not gonna work because it’s not in the text. In the conception. You can’t dress up bad writing and you can make good writing sound bad. But the sound of great poetry is music that is more than music.

CH: I know of a quite famous poet who sometimes didn’t bother with presentation. He would mumble his poems. Yet, at the same time, it was considered a successful reading, largely because the audience knew the poems. I think if I truly want to know a poem I do better when I’m alone with it. I’m not referring to Mallarme, graphic verse, or cummings for that matter.

BMS: But you see, Charles, when listening to something... when apprehending a poem orally, you’re getting input from all sorts of things and it’s often easy to confuse extraneous details with the poem. Which may be good or bad. I mean it may enhance the experience or detract from what was possible. All sorts of things – for good or ill – become associated with the experience of that poem. There are millions of things. You’ve had a great day, your stomach is upset; your car’s been stolen; you’ve just come from your lover's bed, whatever. But if you look at how the poem behaves, both orally and on the page, then you can hear and see the mechanics, how it runs, how it is structured. One of the things I don’t think poets do enough is actually sit down and listen closely to poems. Pi O used to host a weekly gathering at his place in Melbourne. A halfa dozen or more poets would turn up and they’d listen to recordings of the world’s greatest poets. He has a collection of about five hundred spoken-word LPs. And they’d listen to one side of the record – no one says a word – no one is allowed to do anything other than make an occasional note on a piece of paper. When the side was over, they’d have coffee or tea and spend an hour or more talking about what they had heard, what worked and what didn’t work and why. Dealing with the poem as an oral phenomenon, examining the way the poems were structured as apprehended by the ears.

CH: Training the ear.

BMS: Exactly.

CH: Tell me a little bit more about this. Specifically, what are you referring to when you say structure?

BMS: When something is wrong with a piece of writing, whether it’s a poem or a short story or a screenplay, if there’s a moment when your attention lapses, when you lose the thread, I mean the energy... when the tension leaves the piece and you lapse into something else, there’s a very good chance that the reason you’re doing this is because there is something wrong with the structure. A structure is a shape, oral and visual, musical and denotative, which keeps us moving through the expression of the poem or whatever it is. A reader or listener will go anywhere with you so long as you don’t pretend to be taking him or her on a wild goose chase... the journey has to have a kind of urgency, a sense that you are going some place. A good writer or performance poet doesn’t promise something he can’t deliver, he or she doesn’t lead the audience down a path that goes nowhere or is lost in a tangle of conflicted emotions and ideas. Structure is about preparation, and preparation is the key to dramatic impact.

CH: So there is a dramatic method involved...

BMS: No! Not for me. I don’t subscribe to methods, though they seem to be everywhere. All those How-To-Do-It writing books by failed writers. Throw them away. Preparation comes from living inside the work you're creating and which is creating you; it comes from listening to the voices that remain after the false voices have been dismissed. Every human being is his own message and messenger, a menagerie of voices and ears. A well-structured poem – like a well-structured story – reflects back on itself, making subtle and often seemingly invisible relationships among its implicit and explicit manifestations. The art resides in what is invisible. If method comes into it at all, for me, it comes after the creation, when one goes round after the birth, cleaning up the dross, disposing of what is no longer essential. Some poets think of the creative act as a dumb intuitive process, and they are right. However, one must also admit that whenever you commit feelings to language you are involved with structures, and these structures are analysable, as it were, after the fact, both on the page and on the stage.

CH: I'd like to go a little further into this idea of picking up on everyday speech and incorporating that speech into poems. What about everyday writing? Letters, for example. I mean there are letters from the past century written by soldiers, farmers, slaves, men and women, from all sorts of backgrounds, which are very moving, genuine statements.

BMS: Indeed. All those wonderful letters. At least the ones I know of... I'm thinking of those that were read on that series, The Civil War... letters and diary entries, and so forth. I always thought, "My god! This is pure poetry!" The language, the emotion! When I thought about it, I realized these people had one thing in common. The King James Version of The Bible. The language of these letters is not what one would expect from farmers and merchants, husbands and sons. But there it is. And it is a language that is very much in the style of that translation. So these ordinary folk from mid-19th century America are the heirs, the direct heirs, of an Elizabethan English. A language they would've heard in their churches. They would've read it or had it read to them, sitting round a table at night. A lot of the soldiers would've had Bibles with them, which they would've read between engagements, waiting for the next battle to happen. Perhaps they believed this was the sort of language you used because it was full of power and emotion. Certainly, they found their own expressions and way of conveying their most profound sentiments, but they must have drawn on the inspiration of the language they found in their Bibles. That's my theory, anyway. The point is, they lived in a far more oral culture than we do. Remember, in those days, there were people going round giving talks; storytellers were very popular. Instead of going to the movies or the video shop, you'd go to the theatre or town hall, and someone would tell a story of their adventures in the West or their travels in Europe. So people were tuned to the conventions of oral presentation.

CH: How significant is the oral dimension generally? I mean for people who simply don't read poetry or actively avoid it?

BMS: Very significant, very important. The problem is: how to translate those black squiggles on the page into meaningful sounds? We talk all the time, all the time, about literacy. We have problems with literacy - literacy this and literacy that. But the big problem is one of translation. You put a text in front of a kid and you get him or her to read it aloud and even though they can read the whole passage with ease, there is nothing in the voice. I mean the child doesn't know that what is going on is more than word identification. It's about SOUNDS as well, and rhythm, and timbre, and all those musical aspects of language that are mute on the page. The big problem is not literacy but oracy - the inability to lift the print - translate the print - into sound, to give it meaningful voice. Reading aloud is, after all, a translation of text - an interpretation of what is written and the skill to reveal it, to create an aural experience, which does justice to the poem, story, or whatever, is being voiced. This is something that is not usually taught in schools, not in Australia at least. My role as a reader of poetry, or a performer of poetry, is to alert people to the fact that there are ways that poetry can actually have an impact on their lives and that a lot of the problems people have with poetry are due to the fact that they just can't HEAR it!

CH: Yet the problem extends to all writing - fiction, plays, journalism...

BMS: Yes, absolutely. Because anything that works in writing - that possesses emotional impact and endures - involves poetry, or at the very least contains poetic elements. You know, language tells you how to use it. If you listen to it. Let's say you have this line in a poem that you really love. You're dedicated to it. It may be the line that started you out on the process of writing that poem. But every time you read the poem aloud, the line falls flat. It doesn't say what you thought it would say. So you listen even harder and take the discomfort seriously. Maybe the line belongs in another place, or maybe it's better in another poem altogether. The language tells you that - the diction, the colouring, the rhythm, whatever. The line itself cries out to be freed or expunged or re-written - it doesn't comfortable in the company of the other lines.

CH: Tell me more about getting more sense out of The Cantos after hearing Pound recite them.

BMS: Pound is full of ideas. He's constantly pushing ideas and asking for our indulgence and sympathy. But the thing that I respond to is his meticulousness. The genius of Pound is that he approximated in the music of his language what it was he was trying to express intellectually in the poem. His language - its music - creates an emotional subtext of the meaning expressed in the denotation and connotation of the words. And it takes you on an emotional journey whether you understand his ideas or not. How many people listen to a Beethoven symphony and don't understand what he's saying?!! There's something you get just from the sound that says things to you, and Pound was a master of that. He taught lots of people how to do it. And most of them, well a lot of them, never acknowledged the influence.

CH: Let's turn to Aboriginal culture. I think the first thing I would like to know about is the famous "walkabout"... what exactly is this?

BMS: The walkabout is associated with initiations, initiation ceremonies. The walkabout, the coming-of-age ceremony - the making of men and women - is only the first important phase. An initiate goes on a journey into his own country, his own, totemic landscape, to commune with the ancestors and learn about the land, which nourishes both his body and his spirit. Often, an aunt or uncle will teach the boy or girl, showing them various places or sites associated with their dreaming. This includes going to one's "borning place", and the borning places of one's father and mother. One learns to "read" the country, and becomes familiar with those places and spirits one is associated with - one's totem places. The songs or stories, which recount the adventures, which occurred in these places, have even greater power owing to initiate's firsthand experience of various places he has visited. He has been there, he has seen that. It is part of him, or her. And this process - this walkabout - can go on and on throughout one's life, depending on how much that person wants to know, how deeply he or she wants to enter into the inner landscape of Aboriginal myth and spirituality. The initiation process can go well beyond the coming-of-age ceremonies. Like in our own culture. We go to primary school, junior high, college, and so on... we can elect to stop with a high-school diploma or go all the way to a doctorate. Like this, there are different degrees of initiation among tribal Aboriginal people as well.

CH: You are saying that our education has been a walkabout?

BMS: Metaphorically, yes. Education is always a walkabout. The difference between our walkabout and the one the Aborigines experience has to do with the manner in which it occurs. In our culture, so much of what we know and understand is based on what we have read or someone has told us. Our experiences are so vicarious. Alfred North Whitehead was lamenting this fact when he wrote about the second handedness of the learned world. He saw it as the source of mediocrity. But in Aboriginal culture, most of the traditional wisdom and skills are learned firsthand. There are no books to tell you how to track kangaroo or make a fire and find water. One must watch and listen and do. Listening is very important. Most of what is learned about Aboriginal law is learned through the ears. As a matter of fact, the Aboriginal word for "understanding " is exactly the same word as the word "to hear" - kurlinu. The most abusive thing you say about an Aboriginal person is to insult their ears or their ability to hear. Pinakuya (bad ears) or Pinakuna (shit ears) are highly offensive insults. In our culture we say, "I see", when we understand something. In Aboriginal culture and other indigenous cultures they say "I hear you. I hear."

CH: What about the "dreaming". When Aboriginal people talk about the Dreamtime, what are they referring to?

BMS: "Dreamtime" is a very bad translation of the Aranda word, "alcheringa". A better translation of the word is "creation" or "creation times". Creation is something which is dreamed, which is imagined, hence the German to English translation of Dreamtime. It signifies that momentless moment, the timeless time, the eternal solitariness, which knows nothing but freedom, the unbound imagination out of which the countless becomes countable. In Christian theology it is associated with the Fall. The Aborigines' belief is that before creation times, before the dreaming, the world was like an egg. Featureless. Void. The ancestral spirits - which the desert people refer to as "Tingarri" - at the beginning of creation times emerged from the earth. These beings broke through the eggshell and ranged over the land, and every place they went they threw up bits of clay and earth, leaving the marks of their activities behind. Here us where two Tingarri had a fight. The earth is now a clay pan where they wrestled and rolled about. At other place, another Tingarri man dragged his victim back to camp, and in the process carved out a creek bed. Another, exploding from the earth, made a rock hole. At first, these ancestral spirits looked just like people, but slowly they metamorphosed into other beings, either through violence or contact of one sort or another with other Tingarri beings. Some changed in order to escape danger; others in order to attract attention, and so on. They turned into what are now plants and animals. Some of them solidified into stone. So the whole landscape is like a composite signature, written by the exploits of the Tingarri. Now, the interesting thing is that the creation times, this Dreamtime, did not happen in the distant past, way back there where we hardly remember. According to the Aborigines the creation times have just happened, right NOW. We live, as it were, on the nub. The immediate ashes of the actual experience of creation. Which is another way of saying we all live in the past because creation always happens now, in the unknown and unknowable. Through the ceremony, through the songs, we can, as it were, step back to that moment of creation which is outside time, that self-forgetting moment of pure spontaneity uninterrupted by the machinations of the cerebral cortex, in which we become totally what we are, which is spirit, invisible, non-material.

CH: And what about sacred sites?

BMS: There are places, as I've said in the Pound play (Sixteen Words for Water), places one identifies with, full of power and light. Places where we feel at home, where we feel whole. Not necessarily a house, but a location that resonates with our very being. Sites are sacred to Aborigines for the same reason they become sacred to us, and I'm not talking about money and real estate. I'm talking about the power of the land, a focus, a sense of familiarity. One enters a part of the forest or camps out on a particular stretch of river and in those special, sacred places a contentment, a release and sense of eternity, which teaches one about the universe and about oneself. These places, these outward manifestations of the inner sources of personal power are the sites declared sacred by any people who have not totally forsaken their tribal roots.

CH: But Aboriginal culture is not free of problems. You're not saying that.

BMS: No.

CH: So how do they go about dealing with the problems they facing?

BMS: It's difficult because "white" culture - the dominant culture - finds it almost impossible to accommodate Aboriginal law and concepts. And so you have two laws, and much misunderstanding and fear.

CH: You seem to have been quite influenced by the years spent living among the Aboriginal people of Central Australia. Apart from the fact that you have written numerous poems about your experiences there, how have Aborigines and ideas affected your life?

BMS: More than I could ever explain. If nothing else they helped make a storyteller out of me. I learned from them, almost everything that is worth knowing about the art of storytelling. And that is what poetry is, essentially - the most succinct form of the story.

CH: Oral poetry - or performance poetry - seems to be quite an important force within the Australian literary scene. What exactly is going on there? What kind of impact are the performance poets having?

BMS: Most of them - most of the ones I know - hate that tag, "performance poet". When Nigel Roberts, Terry Whitebeach and I went to America on the infamous America Walkabout Tour, we found that what we were doing really connected with the people, everywhere we read. It was great because Nigel and I, if not Terry, felt we were representing something much larger than our own work. I mean, we were also performing other people's stuff. We were presenting a sampling of nearly twenty years of work by a group of poets who have been roundly ignored by academia in Australia. Even now, Pi O and eric beach are finding difficult to get into the major anthologies, despite the fact that they have both had many books published and had a presence in major little magazines for twenty or twenty-five years. I don't know why. It is a constant battle. I mean, my book of poems, Singing the Snake, was doing the rounds for nearly ten years before the company that had already turned it down twice published it. When you look at the poets who are having the most influence among younger writers, it is usually the so-called performance poets who head the pack. And this is significant I think. If you are not influencing the language, and those who use it, if you're not actively working to create a climate in which people are experimenting with the language, well... you die and that's it. In other words, you are not part of what is moving the whole language forward. The academics represent dead ends. But they are safe dead ends. Everything neat and tidy and nailed down. Nailed to irrelevancy. When we toured the States in the 90s, a lot of American poets would come up after our readings to talk to us. They all had the same question. Where's the energy coming from? Somehow, saying it was in the poetry wasn't good enough for them. And I guess there was also the fact that we were performing with two Aboriginal song men, so there was also this kind of cross-fertilization going on as well. You know, feeding off each other, pushing each other, inspiring one another. It was surprising to Americans to discover just how much poetry was going on "down under".

CH: So poetry is very much alive and well.

BMS: Poetry always is. It's only what masquerades as poetry that is sick, dying or dead.

WRITING THE MAGIC

2010-12-29T16:12:00.000+11:00

"Everyone talks about "the magic", but no one knows anything about it. The secret/sacred act by which the story-experience transforms itself into something special defies formula. Spend a lifetime enquiring about its nature; no one will be able to tell you what it is. Though its presence might be obvious, its appearance is unpredictable. One experiences it as a disarming freshness - an enduring "newness" . Whatever it is, you can't cook it up.

"If you want to become the kind of storyteller/filmmaker in whose actions the magic lives, then you must enter into the most intriguing and challenging set of relationships you have ever encountered, relationships in which the essence of the characters intersects and mingles intimately with your own essence, so that you no longer meaningfully distingush these essences or see and hear them as separate.

"Only when your characters' essence (or origins) merges with your own essence (or origins) does the magic, which is ORIGINALITY, become possible."

-Guillaume Marichel

Shakepeare & Co - Paris - 1927

To read more about the MAGIC of non-formulistic, character-driven, dramatic screen storytelling be sure to visit WHERE'S THE DRAMA? at http://www.wheresthedrama.com/

Episode: THE PAWN / Mission Impossible

2010-12-19T10:12:00.000+11:00

Watch one of Billy Marshall Stoneking's episodes of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. Paramount Television's popular 1980s television series, shot in Australia.

Mission Impossible - The Pawn - WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

The I, THOU & IT of Dramatic Screen Storytelling

2010-12-19T08:37:00.000+11:00

Martin Buber, in his major contribution to modern thought, I and Thou, posits a philosophy of personal dialogue in which human existence may be understood and differentiated in terms of the way in which we humans engage in dialogue with each other, with the world, and with the divine. Buber contends that human beings invariably alternate between two attitudes toward the world – one which is expressed through what he refers to as an I-Thou relationship, and the other, which he terms an I-It relationship. I-Thou signifies the relation of subject-to-subject, while I-It is a relation of subject-to-object.

Likewise, the screen storyteller’s relationship with characters may also be understood in terms of such a choice. Does the writer choose an I-Thou relationship, in which the writer is cognizant of and emotionally open to ALL of the characters necessary for finding the story, or does the writer simply enforce his own separate role of chauvinistic puppeteer, armed with a predetermined agenda to which the dramatis personae are obliged to dance as though they were mere puppets dangling at the end of not-quite invisible strings?

In the former relationship, the writer is an equal – no more or less important than the other characters (including the audience and the tribe or tribes whose story is being presented). In such a relationship, the writer acts and interacts within a context in which none of the characters becomes a slave to formula. In an I-Thou relationship, the roles of the characters, including the role of the writer (who is but one character among many), are not subsumed under the tyranny of method or served up in answer to the requirements of technique, or as some simple-minded response to unmanaged fear or prejudice. Successful – i.e.: fresh and original – dramatic characters do not live merely at the pleasure of the storyteller, to be manipulated according to every passing fit and whim. Instead of perceiving one’s fellow characters as separate, isolated beings whose raison d’etre is to serve the insecurities and needs of the writer, and whose actions are aimed at hitting each plot target in a timely fashion, the mediumistic writer immerses him/herself in a vital, transformative dialogue in which ALL of the characters are involved with all of their being with each other.

In contradistinction to this, the I-It relationship, is largely an act of insecurity, a misguided need to control events at any cost, the full meaning of which usually lies beyond one’s emotional comprehension. In an I-It relationship, the screenwriter perceives the characters largely as consisting of specific, isolated qualities and attributes. How many fledging writers have wasted their time and energy compiling copious lists of what foods, colours, clothes, hobbies and attributes their characters like or possess? To perceive characters simply as a list of attributes and attitudes is to view them – and oneself – as fragments of an objectified world of things. I-Thou is a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity, while I-It is a relationship of separateness and detachment.

Screenwriters, and filmmakers generally, often try to convert (or pervert) the subject-to-subject relation to a subject-to-object relation, seldom realising that the being of a subject is a unity that cannot be analysed as an object. When one tries to analyse a subject as an object, the subject is no longer a subject, but becomes an object – in short, it becomes something that it is not – something inauthentic, something contrived or pretentious. When a subject is analysed as an object, the subject is no longer a Thou, but an It. The being, which is analysed as an object, is the It in an I-It relation.

The subject-to-subject relation affirms each subject as having a unity of being, and in that affirmation creates the possibility of recognising that larger unity, which is the resonant power of Love – as an emotional energy binding the two subjects into One. This atonement – or at-one-ment – is the essence of the experience of IDENTICATION, which is the emotional essence of the dramatic experience.

When a subject chooses, or is chosen by, the I-Thou relation, this act involves the subject’s whole being. Thus, the I-Thou relation is an act of choosing, or being chosen, to become the subject of a subject-to-subject relation. The subject becomes a subject through the I-Thou relation, and the act of choosing this relation affirms the subject’s whole being.

Buber says that the I-Thou relation is a direct interpersonal relation that is not mediated by any intervening system of ideas. No objects of thought intervene between I and Thou.1 I-Thou is a direct relation of subject-to-subject, which is not mediated by any other relation. To accept this is to suddenly be free of all those screenwriting tomes and how-to books by which the snake-oil salesmen ply their foolishness. One is either IN the drama and in an I-Thou relationship with one’s characters or one is not, and the only things that method, technique and formula can do is to keep you from entering into the only kind of relationship that will make any difference at all.

Thus, I-Thou is not a means to some object or goal, but is an ultimate relation involving the whole being of each subject.

Love, as a relation between I and Thou, is a subject-to-subject relation. Buber claims that love is not a relation of subject-to-object. In the I-Thou relation, subjects do not perceive each other as objects, but perceive each other’s unity of being. Love is an I-Thou relation in which subjects SHARE this unity of being. Love is also a relation in which I and Thou share a sense of caring, respect, commitment, and responsibility. In this way, the writer/story relationship is both a sacred trust and a secret feeling.

Buber argues that, although the I-Thou relation is an ideal relation, the I-It relation is an inescapable relation by which the world is viewed as consisting of knowable objects or things. The I-It relation is the means by which the world (or screenplay) is analysed and described. However, the I-It relation may become an I-Thou relation, and in the I-Thou relation we can interact with the world in its whole being.

In the I-Thou relation, the I is unified with the Thou, but in the I-It relation, the I is detached or separated from the It. The detachment is frequently perceived as a threat, something that must be manipulated or dominated, something that can be sorted out and when sorted out can produced money and fame.

In the I-Thou relation, the being of the I belongs both to I and to Thou.

In the I-It relation, the being of the I belongs to I, but not to It.

I-Thou is a relation in which I and Thou have a shared reality. And in the world of screen storytelling, this is nowhere better expressed than through STORY. Story is the shared reality of ALL the characters, but never becomes fully born unless all of the characters are involved with all of their being, and BEING WITH.

The I which has no Thou has a reality which is less complete than that of the I in the I-and-Thou. The I which has no Thou seeks meaning in what it might acquire – and in the realm of storytelling this often means the frantic acquisition of incompatible additions to that incomplete reality that will remain eternally incomplete by virtue or such additions.

The more that I-and-Thou share their reality, the more complete is their reality. No addition is necessary. Their completion merely multiplies completion.

Buber equates God with the eternal Thou. God is the Thou that sustains the I-Thou relation eternally. Whether one accepts the idea of God or not is less important to committed storyteller than the wisdom that the eternal Thou is not an object of experience, nor is it an object of thought. The eternal Thou is not something that can be pigeon-holed, investigated or examined. The eternal Thou is not a knowable object.

The unformed character – the goad to action – the uncarved block that pits one’s courage against unlimited possibilities – call it what you like – God or the imagination, or freedom (including the freedom to choose not to be free - as in the Garden of Eden story – whatever you like, Thou is the barrier-less Being through which and from which one speaks to the future and from which the future is becoming, becoming present, not yet. It is the courage to Be that appears when everything that we have held most dearly disappears in the anxiety of doubt.

One does not use knowledge to get one to the edge. Knowledge is the edge. If one is to leap into the unknown - which is the story - one will have to leave knowledge behind. The leaping IS the Thou before Thou appears.

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1 Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 26.

THE DRAMA OF SCREENWRITING - the legendary character workshop for screen storytellers

2010-11-17T12:24:00.000+11:00

THE DRAMA OF SCREENWRITING

returns to AFTRS

The legendary screen storytelling workshop devised by Billy Marshall Stoneking will return to AFTRS in 2011. For both experienced and beginning filmmakers, this workshop offers unique opportunity to discover and apply to one's work the grammar of dramatic screen storytelling as it is expressed in MEDIUMISTIC, Character-driven drama.

Powerful and believable characters are essential to the life of any screenplay, and the screenwriter’s relationship with character is the primary relationship in the dramatic enterprise of “finding the story“. Since 2001, screenwriters, directors, producers, editors, designers and actors, have been influenced and inspired by the unforgettable experience of dramatic storytelling that Billy Marshall Stoneking’s now legendary character workshop offers its participants. This is neither McKee warmed up nor Syd Field in paraphrase, but a totally unique take on screen story-finding that will change the way you connect with your characters, and they connect with each other.

THE DRAMA OF SCREENWRITING has started many a filmmaker on the road to creating and developing award-winning and critically acclaimed short films, features and documentaries. Participants have described this workshop as:

‘A must do course for the brave. To uncover in yourself the courage to write from the core’

‘I loved the course. It was inspirational and went to great depths on screenwriting’

Students will come face-to-face with the living, emotional energy that is the basis of effective, cinematic, character-based dramatic storytelling. The workshop itself becomes a story in which the participant encounters and interacts with dramatic characters and situations that they have created.

BOOK ONLINE NOW to ensure your place in this extraodinary, life and career changing 4 days. ‘A must do course for the brave. To uncover in yourself the courage to write from the core.’

BOOKINGS at http://openprogram.aftrs.edu.au/course/W106

Reply to a Reader who asked: "What exactly is DRAMA?"

2010-11-04T18:25:00.000+11:00

A dramatic story is a structured presentation of emotional energy given moment, movement, and meaning (form) by the actions of characters. Dramatic characters are necessarily threatened or otherwise endangered by a disturbance or problem of such magnitude and urgency that, unless they deal with it immediately and find a way of overcoming or neutralising it, they risk losing what they most desire. Galvanised by a human need that is identifiable to an audience, and guided by a clear objective or goal as well as a plan for achieving that goal, the dramatic character struggles against seemingly overwhelming opposition in order to achieve his or her objective.

DRAMA arises every time when change forces change upon CHARACTERS that we care about. Change is expressed through the actions of the characters and/or Nature, and a dramatic story acknowleges and dramatises the proposition that life is "a perpetual perishing", and that it is in the essential nature of a human being in the course of BEING to "rage, rage against the dying of the light:.

The struggle or the contest by which we (as audience and co-creators of the story) FEEL our existence is framed in drama - it may come in the guise of a desire that is suddenly frustrated, the loss of someone or something that is precious to us or with which we identify, or as self-doubt occasioned by a severe psychological wound, or as an existential disconnection that renders life meaningless.

The striving against everything that might frustrate, discourage, or ultimately defeat us (and the characters in the story) - this striving is the essence of dramatic action, together with ours and the characters' refusal to accept the prevailing conditions, which in turn leads us back to our own origins and the essence or source of our slavery and our freedom.

OMNIBUS

2010-10-16T13:44:00.000+11:00

Click To Play

Omnibus (1992) is a short comedy film directed by Sam Karmann. It won an Academy Award in 1993 for Best Short Subject and it won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. In terms of dramatic storytelling this is arguably one of the best short films ever made.

Produced by Anne Bennet
Written by Sam Karmann & Christian Rauth
Starring Daniel Rialet & Jacques Martial
Cinematography Daniel Diot
Editing by Robert Rongier

SUGGESTIBILITY & THE ART OF THE INVISIBLE

2010-10-09T18:33:00.000+11:00

Cinematic storytelling is “the art of the invisible” to the extent that a good deal of what a dramatic screen story MEANS is seldom if ever seen or heard; more often than not, it is suggested or implied by the interplay of image, sound and character. Likewise, a screenplay’s facility for multiplying meaning cannot be reduced or accounted for merely in terms of the details it resumés, or the collection and ordering of events it presents. A successful screenplay’s power resides in its ability to stimulate and sustain an audience’s emotional participation and involvement in the story’s characters and their quest. To do this it must conjure images and sounds in such a way that it transforms its audience into a character among the other characters within the story world that the script evokes. Where the transformation is successful the audience is energised and inspired to forge some kind of identification with one or more of the characters in the drama. In effecting this degree of engagement, the screenwriter must necessarily explore and present his/her story in such a way that its ultimate realisation requires a series of imaginative and fully interactive experiences that involve readers (or audience), screenwriter, tribe and the dramatis personae (the characters in the screenplay).

Aspiring screenwriters commonly write feature-length scripts filled with prosaic details concerning the lives of their characters. Physical descriptions, the way in which they move, the circumstances of their daily lives, and the relationships in which they are involved are presented, sometimes in rich detail. Some writers even go to great pains to describe or illustrate the values and attitudes that lie behind the actions of the characters and the key relationships that have informed and influenced their lives. But somehow the mass of information remains aggravatingly little more than information and seldom if ever rises to the level of dramatic action.

Fundamentally, most stories fail to connect emotionally with their audience because the script itself lacks the essential underpinning of a dramatic grammar. Stories that eschew the grammar entirely run the risk of coming across as arbitrary, rambling, or cryptically personal at best, and usually thoroughly opaque or confusing at worst. Certainly, the ungrammatical construction of any narrative undermines the emotional logic that might otherwise tease significance and meaning from the actions of the characters.

Symptomatic of this is the way in which most screenplays manage to avoid ACTION and change. In their failure to present active characters in pursuit of clear goals, whose needs and desires are opposed or undermined by formidable opposition, the most would-be dramatic stories forfeit any claim they may have had on our attention or concern. Instead of goal-driven characters whose actions are continuously frustrated or complicated as a result of nature or the incompatible agendas of other characters, what we have instead is little more than a collection of historical (or expository) events that produce a screenplay much less than the sum of its parts.

In terms of dramatic storytelling, there is a massive difference between the delineation of events and the presentation of active characters in pursuit of compelling objectives, the very pursuit of which conveys a sense of risk and ever-increasing danger. Events tend to be linear; whereas dramatic action is always concentric, rippling out through the story-world, affecting the emotional energy, well-being and meaning of every other action. Stories that are dramatic, that effect change in all of the characters – including the audience, the tribe/s and screenwriter – are stories possessed by characters that we care about because they are embroiled in adversarial relationships in which something of value is at stake, something with which we, the audience, identify as important or worthwhile. In the struggle to protect, save or retrieve what has been threatened, we are tossed about and tormented continuously by the nagging of all questions, “what if?”

In short, dramatic action is the primary means by which an audience is guided to the threshold of a story’s meaning. It is through a character’s actions – what the character does and says – that the writer is able to reveal and illuminate what are essentially internal states of being (i.e.: the emotions and the emotional logic that gives those feelings meaning).

But mere action is not enough. Cinema fails when all it does is explain or simply show in a strictly linear way. It must also allow its audience the opportunity to participate in the creation and realisation of the story. This is also the case even at screenplay stage of the process. An effective screenplay communicates best when it cultivates and exploits the reader’s empathy in ways that permit the reader to see or realise meaning that is only suggested by what is shown in the “big print” or stated by the characters in dialogue. One might say that it is not mere actions that contain meaning, but what a character’s actions and their relationship to each other and to the actions of the other characters imply or suggest. In the process, of entering and operating within this nexus of relationships, the visionary screenwriter/filmmaker cultivates a keen awareness of and sensitivity to something greater than what is simply presented to the eyes and ears.

A dramatic screen story’s most profound and memorable actions simply and potently suggest what is not seen and not heard by presenting a complex, rhythmic interplay of image, sound and character that provoke energy and - through a synergistic interplay and interaction amongst all the characters and their conflicting agendas - produce ever increasing emotional intensity or energy.

Constructively, the first thing this writer should do is go through the script with a pen or pencil and excise everything that is absolutely not essential for conveying the story. In this way, the writer might be able to sweep away enough of the unnecessary language to see what is missing and what NEEDS to be there, DRAMATICALLY.

As well, the writer is obliged to look at every character and ascertain what it is that each one wants, and why they want it, and who or what is stopping them from having it and why? These are the fundamental character questions that must be answered by the actions and words of the characters if one is to find or create a dramatic story. At the very least the writer needs to emotionally intersect with and understand each character’s quest. What is it each one wants? What is the wound that each is trying to heal? Who or what caused the wound? What part did each play in their wounding, or in stopping the wound from being healed? Who or what does each character fear and why? These are but some of the necessary character questions any dedicated screenwriter writer must seek answers to if he/she is to discover the emotional heart of the story.

I daresay the first place a writer should look is at his/her own life, and the relationships he/she had with parents and siblings, as well as his/her partner and children if there are children. In order to penetrate to the essence or source of a character’s identity, one must be prepared to penetrate and explore the origins of one’s own nature. A dramatic screen story cannot hope to be either surprising or fresh if authentic discoveries are not made by the writer in the quest to find the characters and their emotional journey. The journeys compliment and reflect one another.

Guided by a mostly intuitive grasp of the emotional logic that sustains and guides the characters’ objectives and plans, as well as the threats and fears that threaten, subvert and frustrate their well-being or the well-being of those they care about, the screenwriter selects, orders and calibrates in written text, those images and sounds that maximise dramatic interaction among all the characters whilst providing and maintaining the shareability of experience necessary for stimulating in the audience a degree of emotional identifications with those characters.

Just as a screenplay presents a blueprint or plan for a dramatic narrative rooted in action and sound, so, too, are its constituent actions and sounds provocations that compel us to look beyond what is actually shown and stated. Character-based screenwriting acknowledges this implicit “language” by enlarging the concept of what it means to be “a character”, and by permitting each of the characters their voice, contradictions and ambiguities. Successful character-based drama pits characters. one against the other, without losing sight of the love, which some times looks more like hate. If one is to work effectively one will have to cultivate a degree of intimacy and openness with all of one’s characters, enough to coherently embody each character’s inconsistencies, anxieties, hopes, rhythms, gestures, habits, idiosyncrasies and speech patterns. Prescriptive methods, formulas, and every kind of analytical technique divorced from the lives and emotions of the characters will not in themselves be of much use. Cinema - the art of the invisible - demands something more than a recipe a and the transformation and surprise that lend a dramatic story its power, freshness and originality can be neither quantified nor categorised. They arise from those words and actions that speak in us, that sneak up on us in the dark and shake us to our core.

When a dramatic story surprises us it does so not so much because of what it actually shows and tells, but rather because of the way in which it engages our imagination and concern. A story conveyed mediumistically makes all of the characters - including the screenwriter and the audience - participants in the story and story-world that is the collective identity of these characters in the act of finding the story, a story that all of the characters are discovering by means of dramatic action and interaction.

Fresh and meaningful screenplays and films demand more than cold-blooded strategies and calculated formulae if they are to work magic. In the process of finding a story worth telling one will do well to avoid keeping company with the various, popular screenwriting tomes replete with their tried-and-true principles, procedures and recipes for screenwriting success. The so-called “gurus” that promulgate the tidal wave of how-to-write-a-screenplay books have usually had about as much experience conceiving and writing dramatic screenplays as your average football supporter has had with the actual experience of playing World Cup soccer – an experiential shortcoming that nevertheless doesn’t deter them from offering sage advice to any would-be player with a passing interest in the game. Trot them onto the field, however, and ask them to perform – like you would of any dramatic character – and you’ll soon find them every bit as passive as those characters you’ve wished you’d never written.

Rather than relying on prescriptive principles and methods, the mediumistic screenwriter proceeds like one who is both blind and deaf, grappling in the sightlessness of learning, sophistication and habit for one, authentic and powerful action, for a sound that can be trusted, a sound from that intimate “other” that is heard intuitively at first and then only fleetingly. One must learn to trust oneself without falling prey to what one was educated to believe. This sort of trusting is hard-won and occurs only, if at all, after so many false starts, wrong turns and misguided choices that it seems one might more easily and more comfortably crawl into a hole than finish the first draft of a powerful screenplay.

Screen storytellers who would operate as mediums must sharpen their perceptions in the life and death struggle that eternally rages between knowledge and ignorance, in the battle between habit and discovery, between love and indifference, in that theatre of illusion where the souls of all characters meet and fight and reveal themselves through what they do and say, and through what is suggested by what they do and say, in deeds and words that operate on multiple levels, circles within circles, streaming out from a source that is all and becomes all.

To wrestle dramatically and creatively with oneself (and the other characters) requires sensitivity and some facility for managing one’s anxieties, as well as one’s relationship to and understanding of the sights and sounds one encounters in the evolving struggle. It requires that one is open to the rhythms inherent in character actions while maintaining a keen awareness of the range of possibilities concerning the interactions and orderings of these as they occur visually and aurally.

As one discovers what the images are and begins to commit to some while omitting others, one tests the efficacy of every action, of every word, nuance, tone and colour - of everything shown and not shown, said and not said, so as to see and hear what is neither shown nor heard. One must dream the alchemist’s dream – this obsessive sifting, combining, combing through, and separating the base materials in search of the self-alteration that is complete identification with one’s characters and their emotional life. The real power of film resides in what it allows us to imagine as a result of the flow of images and sounds.

When one observes a film, one sees and hears characters going about their business within a setting, but when one experiences a film one actually undergoes a transformation of emotions produced not simply by what is seen and heard but by what is implied or suggested. In its suggestibility, a film offers its audience a chance to interact with and participate in the creation of meaning and thus to identify more intimately with what the characters are doing and why they are doing it. Hence, at any one time in cinematic storytelling, story is operating on three different, albeit inter-connected levels – text, subtext and context.

Since the most interesting and compelling dramatic characters are almost always rendered impotent by obvious expository detail, dialogue and stereotypical behaviour (except some times in the case of comedy), what is it that permits us entry into the inner lives of the characters - that most private and inward world of the heart? By what means are we conducted from passive spectators to active participants – indeed, to empathetic co-creators of the story-coming-into-being? What is the essential nature of the “happenings” that occur in a dramatic screenplay and film that allow us – or any audience - to enter into a deeply personal and highly emotional relationship with one or more of the characters?

These are questions predicated upon the assumption that a film’s essential drama is grounded in character. They also assume that the emotions of characters in a screenplay – like human emotions – are substantially internal. If one assumes the essential inwardness of the emotions and affirms that feeling is both personal and private to the character or person undergoing the feeling, then the dramatisation of emotion requires that the screenwriter/character, aided and abetted by both audience and tribe, makes the inner journey in order to intuitively uncover the authentic outward actions, including their rhythms, counterpoint and juxtapositions with other actions, gestures, and images. One bodies forth the characters in order to understand at a level deeper than intellect the play of emotional energy that commands our attention and the attention of those who come within its ambit.

A dramatic screen story is like an iceberg; only part of it is showing. The dangerous stuff – the stuff that threatens and endangers and makes us sit up and pay attention is always below the surface, operating in the interplay between story, audience, screenwriter and the context in which they create one another and themselves.

The power of cinema resides in what it enables us to imagine. Hence, the defining power of cinematic narrative is its facility for embodying a multifarious suggestibility unequalled by other forms of artistic expression.

It is not possible to speak about “suggestibility” without acknowledging the importance of irony. The word “irony” derives from the Greek “eironeia,” = simulated ignorance, denoting a form of dialectic employed by teachers, like Socrates, who pretend NOT to know something in order to get a student/opponent to explain it; so that their explanation can be used as a starting point for picking their argument apart, thus opening their minds to other possibilities. Irony involves a contrast – an awareness of at least two divergent understandings or realities operating side-by-side. When speaking of cinematic drama, three types of irony can be identified: dramatic irony, situational irony and verbal irony.

Dramatic irony occurs whenever a character makes a fateful choice based upon information that the audience knows is incorrect or incomplete. Situational irony, on the other hand, occurs when one of the characters in the story knows something that the audience doesn’t know, but which the audience will find out about at some stage during the course of the action. The Sixth Sense provides an example of this type of irony. Whereas verbal irony is any form of speech in which what is said is not what is meant; sarcasm, being a case in point.

Subtext, or cinematic implication (which applies equally to word and image), calls our attention to what lies behind, beyond or within the literal meanings or significations of film text; but, while subtext is a crucial component in nearly every successful character-based screenplay, it is but one kind of suggested meaningfulness.

Dramatic film stories order and present actions imbued with emotional energy, in time. The emotional energy conveyed is invariably expressed in rhythmic “strings” of character-driven images and sounds (including dialogue and other utterances) that lure us – almost hypnotically – into a fixated receptiveness not dissimilar to a trance state. Each unit of action occurs in time and is possessed of its own timing and pace. A character’s gestures, movements, expressions and words are time events. And the rhythms inherent in what they do and say tell us much about them.

Rhythm also, like subtext, suggests - but in an entirely different manner. The rhythm of the scene, the sequence, and of every act, is embodied and played out in the rhythms of the characters – their speech, actions, and interactions. Rhythm is, perhaps, the dramatic screenplay’s most primitive and seductive means of conducting an audience toward the emotional core of both character and story.

As humans, we are particularly susceptible to rhythm. Our lives are framed and continuously enlivened by it. Our breathing, our heartbeats, the movement of the sun and moon, the tides, and seasons, all bear witness to our intimate connection with pattern and the recurring alterations of contrasting intervals of sight and sound. The rhythms of nature evoke a livingness that calls us by a million names. Rhythm changes the way we do business; it alters the way we feel about people, about places, about ourselves. It is the secret persuasiveness lurking within every language – that ever-present movement and flow of energy that one rides with a growing sense of adventure in the reading or viewing of a dramatically realised story. Rhythm is the magic by which a writer attracts and captures an audience, the seemingly spontaneous and effortless dance by which one’s tribe initiates the uninitiated, the primordial source of inspiration by which one forgets oneself in order to find oneself in one’s characters. To write a dramatic screenplay in ignorance of your characters’ inherent rhythms is as meaningful as jumping rope under water.

The Ancients understood the ritualistic power and seductiveness of rhythm: the tribal drumbeat, the ritual dance, the mesmerising chant. Today, the computer monitor and two fingers on a keyboard replace the campfire, the toms-toms and the dance, but the beat goes on, behind and within everything that is alive. No matter what you do, without it, without that rhythm, the characters can have no life; the screenplay is still-born.

Rhythm is the pulse of the story, the pace and timing by which living characters go on living and make their emotions present and recognisable, moving expeditiously from one action to the next, from beginning to middle to end. And as they move from one dramatic situation to the next, as their actions alter their relationships and their proximity to the problems and possible solutions that confound and comfort them, the beats and off-beats, the syncopated surprises and unexpected shifts of meter keep us – the audience - alert, surrounded and emotionally involved. We know we are in the presence of characters that matter because their rhythms are continuously present. As the Duke Ellington song has been reminding us since 1931, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Another type of suggestibility can be found in the cinematic application of a poetic figure of speech called synecdoche, in which a part of something is employed to suggest the larger thing that it belongs to. Synecdoche is employed in a scene from Goodfellas, when Henry Hill’s narration and a panning POV shot introduce us to the wiseguys in Henry’s world – guys with names like Freddy No Nose, Fat Andy, and Jimmy Two Times (who said everything twice, everything twice). But synecdoche also works visually, through sign and symbol. When the poet, Ezra Pound, said “the natural object is the best symbol”, he was referring to poetry; but it is an observation that also applies to cinematic storytelling. When the singularity of the natural object references the pervasive and underlying beliefs or history of an entire society, as it does so effectively in the flyblown image of the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies, one is in the presence of synecdoche. Likewise, the mystery Rosebud – which we discover at the end of Citizen Kane is the brand-name of a sled that the young Kane played with as a child, but in the course of the reporter’s quest to discover the significance of Kane’s last words, it has also come to suggest innocence and the love for a home and a mother that he lost to fortune.

In The Verdict, when lawyer, Frank Galvan - played by Paul Newman - goes to visit his client, traumatised by medical malpractice by doctors at one of Boston’s foremost Catholic training hospitals, he steps into a sterile ward in which the only sound is a mechanical breathing machine, an inhuman device that keeps his client precariously suspended between life and death. The noise it makes provides the perfect synecdoche for what Newman and his client are fighting for and against – the machine implies survival, but it also represents the inhuman, mechanised world of the hospital and the legal system that defends it. The breathing apparatus in the ward very subtly suggests this by referencing the world of machines and systems and their clinical connection to human life and death. The courts and the legal machinations which establish the court’s power and authority can also be just as cold and unfeeling, a central thematic idea in the story, and one that is reinforced in the very next scene when Galvan confronts the archbishop and refuses to settle out of court because, “if I take the money, I’m lost.” In a sense, Galvan too is on life-support – this is the case that will either make him or break him depending on what he does. And he is up against the toughest legal machine in Boston. The machine mentality and Galvin’s fear of what the machine can do to him if he refuses its succour keep him suspended in a kind of living death, a death that he can only break away from if he takes himself – metaphorically – off the machine.

In Hitchcock’s thriller, Dial M For Murder, there is a long scene between ex-tennis pro, Tony (played by Ray Milland) who is the husband of Margot (played by Grace Kelly) and Tony’s unsavoury and money-hungry former classmate, Lesgate, whom Tony has elected to murder his wife. In the cat’n’mouse that ensues, Tony outlines “the perfect crime” while Lesgate plays devil’s advocate, offering up various reservations and objections concerning Tony’s plan. At the conclusion of their discussion, Tony asks for an answer. In reply, Lesgate picks up the envelope containing the down–payment on “the hit”, and slips it into his jacket pocket. The envelope is another example of the dramatic use of synecdoche. He never says he will murder Margot, but his action of picking up the envelope suggests no other possibility.

The art of cinema at its most powerful presents images and sounds that make us imagine the presence of something that is not actually shown. The opening sequence of Jaws provides an excellent example of this. We do not see the shark – not for the first forty-minutes of the film - but its presence and the threat it poses are vividly suggested by the clever use of character-specific cinematography and the now-famous music. At one point, the camera is underwater, looking up at the unsuspecting legs of an attractive, bikini-clad teenage girl, and, for that moment, we ARE the shark, stalking its prey. Then suddenly the shot switches to the top of the water as the girl is hit, dragged sideways, then pulled under into a boiling fountain of red that gushes everywhere. .

The use of the POV shot is a common type of suggestibility, almost exclusive to cinematic storytelling, and, when used wisely, is an effective way of building suspense within a scene. But POV is not limited to the unobserved observer perspective. At another point of the story, the local chief of police, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), is on the beach when he sees teenager, Alex Kintner, eaten by the shark. The camera does a close-up on Brody while pulling the background away from him, suggesting an inner state of traumatic horror and shock at what is being seen. Without actually showing the shark, the viewer feels what Brody must be feeling while seeing the attack.

While these sorts of cinematic decisions may be right for films like Jaws and other genre pieces, they may be too broad or exaggerated to work effectively in stories that feature characters of greater complexity. But the central concept - the use of suggestibility in telling effective stories – is just as relevant to more sophisticated storytelling as it is to melodrama. Most filmmakers are only too aware of what can be accomplished by a creative use of suggestible sounds and images, especially when these are arranged in such a way that their relationship to other images and sounds promotes the multiplication of meaning within a scene and between one scene and another.

The multiplication of meaning, created and conducted by way of suggestibility, is central to Eisenstein’s montage theory, and is one of cinema’s key principles – the idea that by placing this image next to that image, one can create – or suggest – a meaning that is not contained in either image when looked at in isolation from the other. The best films have always thrived on the opportunities afforded by this kind of suggestibility. Their power derives from what the audience contributes by way of reading the implications of one image to the next.

The Kuleshov effect - named after and demonstrated by the Russian filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov - provides yet another example of the way in which the audience mixes one image with another to imaginatively produce a meaning that is not contained in either image looked at in isolation. The Kuleshov experiment involved a series of still photographs. The first, being a close-up of a man looking into the lends of a camera for a number of seconds. Then the image cuts to a photograph of a plate of porridge. We hold on this image for a number of seconds, then cut back to the close-u[ of the man, who now we understand, from the porridge and the look on the man’s face, suggests that he is hungry or at least wanting to eat. Then the image of the man cuts to a photograph of a dead baby and we hold on the corpse for a umber of seconds before cutting back to the man who now looks distinctly sad, upset, beside himself over the death of his child. What is interesting is that the photo of the man is always the same photo, but what we see in it is altered or suggested by the context on the images juxtaposed to it.

In the film, Silence of the Lambs, the Polaroid that Clarisse (Jody Foster) is shown – a snapshot of Hannibal Lector’s last victim – is made much more gruesome by the fact that we never actually see the picture. What we see is her boss handing her a Polaroid, then we see her reaction as the FBI chief explains how they needed dental records in order to identify the victim. The look of Clarisse’s face as she stares at the photograph says it all, without us ever seeing the actual photograph. Because cinema can arrange images in a pre-determined order, directing our attention to what it wants us to see when it wants us to see it, and because it has the power to manipulate the rate at which the images come at us from the screen, its facility for implying and provoking visions beyond what is actually seen is remarkable.

In cinema, to show is not always to reveal. Sometimes, to show is to resolve, to reduce the emotional energy that is at play in a scene. Sometimes, to show is often to limit – to render finite an emotion or an experience (this, not that), and in so doing to acquit our interest and involvement in it. Some times, as in the case of Silence of the Lambs, to suggest what a photograph reveals by showing us Clarisse’s reaction to it speaks much more loudly and more horrifically than any art director’s artificially constructed madness.

Likewise, the shower scene in Psycho – suggests more than it shows. The pace of the cutting and the juxtaposition of images stimulate the viewer to “mix” perceptually what is shown with what is implied, and to “see” what is actually not shown, i.e.: a knife viciously stabbing a naked body.

The writer, Flannery O’Connor, in writing about the power of symbol in story, notes that “certain… details will tend to accumulate meaning… and when this happens they become symbolic…” She goes on to say: “I once wrote a story called “Good Country People” in which a lady Ph.D. has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman whom she has tried to seduce. Now I'll admit that, paraphrased in this way, the situation is simply a low joke. The average reader is pleased to observe anybody's wooden leg being stolen. But without ceasing to appeal to him and without making any statements of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning. Early in the story, we're presented with the fact that the Ph.D. is spiritually as well as physically crippled. She believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now of course this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. The reader learns how the girl feels about her leg, how her mother feels about it, and how the country women feel about it, and finally, by the time the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is, as the saying goes, loaded. (So) when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl's personality…”

O’Connor’s story is perhaps one of the most chilling stories of rape ever written, and yet nothing overtly sexual happens. The rape is the taking away of the young woman’s identity, stealing her power, a power that her intellect allowed her to believe was unassailable by any one so lowly and uneducated as a huckster Bible salesman.

This accumulation of meaning by objects or places is yet another example of the way in which screen stories – through an effective use of symbol – work to suggest meanings within a context that is larger than the screen and the actual scripted story.

Characters, too, can be symbols as easily as objects. When characters operate in this manner they take on the quality of archetypes. In the film Citizen Kane, Kane and his history come to be synonymous with the American Dream. Kane is not simply a newspaperman, he is THE newspaperman – the consummate American entrepreneur who builds a fortune on the ideals of freedom of speech.

Cinema, too, in its efficacy to suggest, or multiply meaning, accumulates significance through images, actions and words. Its ultimate significance is mostly due to its facility to engage its audience imaginatively, by suggesting meanings that have emotional context and force. Every time a cinema story suggests more than it shows it gives its audience a chance to make the story its own.

DRAMA ACCORDING TO STONEKING

2010-09-08T15:02:00.000+10:00

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2010-09-04T09:40:00.000+10:00

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CHARACTER, AUDIENCE & TRIBE IN THE ART OF COLLABORATION

2010-09-03T08:26:00.000+10:00

Let me begin by saying that for some time now I have been teaching – although “teaching” really isn’t the word for it – I have been one among a number of dramatic storytellers involved in a series of workshops called “The Drama of Screenwriting” in which participants conceive, write and perform a series of dramatic monologues and scenes that are then interrogated, improvised upon, re-written and re-performed. What is discovered in the act of embodying dramatic characters is both illuminating and informative, and almost always inspiring. Each incarnation of the workshop has its own unique character, provoked into being by the collective imagination and actions of those involved, but common to all is the desire on the part of every participant to go out and tell as well as show others what they have discovered, which, of course, has generated an unprecedented explosion in the number of applicants, all clamouring for a chance to experience dramatic storytelling up-close.

A good deal of what I’m going to say here today is due to the challenges and discoveries that have come from working with both students and staff here in the hothouse laboratory of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Working in a place like this, you are continually bombarded with opportunities to observe, test and question, the assumptions, methods and processes associated with activities relevant to the creation of screen-based stories.

One of the more important observations I have made during my time here concerns the nature of collaboration. By “collaboration” I refer to the actions of any group of skilled individuals whose interactions are characterised by a constructive share-ability of experience directed towards commonly held goals. While the school has always extolled the value of collaboration it has not always succeeded in conducting the creative energies that are at play here in ways that conscientiously advantage a collaborative approach to character-based storytelling.

Part of the failure is due to a lack of experience and confidence on the part of students and staff in understanding and employing dramatic action in ways that are mindful of the grammar by which such action is made meaningful. The lack of fluency in this regard frequently makes constructive discourse about the work difficult if not impossible, which in turn leads to misunderstandings, wounded egos and a general dissatisfaction with the creative process. In the past this was also aggravated by the absence of any common criteria as to what made a dramatic story dramatic. Students and staff had opinions and prejudices about what they liked and why they liked it, to be sure, but neither one possessed a sufficient understanding of the grammar to enable them to effectively examine the characters’ actions enough to penetrate the inner lives of the characters and the essence of the story’s energy.

Having a working understanding of the means by which stories convey meaningful emotional energy (i.e.: the dramatic grammar) enables storytellers to conceive as well as articulate critical and constructive insights about the characters and their actions, and the degree to which the selection and ordering of these actions works to clarify or obscure the emotional and physical journey that is the story. The non-intuitive storyteller, on the other hand, because he or she is not conversant in the grammar, will struggle to become an effective member of the collaborative team.

Even at the best of times, insightful and constructive comment and criticism concerning story is a rarity. When I first took up my appointment here in 2001, it was almost non-existent. Script conferences were little more than thinly disguised recitations of each team member’s prejudices and fears. Critical discourse seldom progressed beyond “I don’t like the ending” or “It wouldn’t happen like that in real life”; or “Poor people don’t talk like this”. And that was about as far as it got. It was as if the students didn’t know what they were looking at. As far as story was concerned, they had no way of picking it up, turning it over, hearing it, smelling it, tasting it, shaking it, seeing what it was doing and why it was doing it.

In an attempt to remedy this problem, the screenwriting department introduced what came to be known as “The Drama Report” – a twelve-page document composed of a series of questions concerning the dramatic actions of the characters in the script, and the circumstances affecting those actions. Students who used the report quickly discovered that when a script couldn’t provide answers to such questions as “who is the main character?” or “who or what opposes the main character?” the script was invariably ineffective in conveying a coherent dramatic story with enough emotional energy to compel attention and real interest.

Storytellers that ignore or disrespect the grammatical forms through which character actions find intensity and meaning fail because the storytellers do not understand the language with which, and through which, they are working – a language that communicates by evoking and presenting, then building and releasing emotional energy. When the energies in a story are neither built nor released, the story stagnates, which is another way of saying, it becomes undramatic.

But make no mistake. The mere fact that a script provides answers to all the questions is no guarantee that it will avoid mediocrity. No set of questions or answers, on its own, can ever guarantee the creation of an enduring and powerful story. Despite its obvious usefulness as a diagnostic tool, the Drama Report can never address what is most important to any dramatic story, namely freshness, surprise and credibility, or what some storytellers refer to as “its magic”.

So where and how does one find what is fresh?

A while back, Bill Russo[1] came to me with an idea for a feature film that had been brewing inside him for years. After hearing him out I suggested he started writing it down, in script form, which he did. Then, over a period of 18 months or so, he kept bringing it back for me to read and discuss, draft after draft, during which time we talked a great deal about character and story and the means by which storytellers entered into the dramatic action and conducted the energy that that action created. It was an incredibly stimulating experience, accompanying Bill – a formidable film editor – on a journey of discovery towards the first draft of his first-ever screenplay. What developed was the sort of interaction that ought to be happening around here a lot more than it actually does. As I conducted Bill into the world of screenwriting, he conducted me into the world of editing, and we both began to see ever more clearly how writing and editing are intimately entwined, so much so that one could almost say that writing is editing. Halfway into the process, Bill said: “I wish I’d written a script 20 years ago; it would’ve made me a much better editor.”

What we were both sensitive to and what made the collaboration so useful to both of us was the recognition of what we held in common. And the common understanding centred upon our passion for character and the energies that the characters’ actions were building and releasing in the rhythmic flow of the story.

Experiences like this encouraged me to look at the nature of dramatic storytelling in ways that went far beyond the perspective usually ascribed to writers. Through my association with Bill and others I began to appreciate the full significance of an insight I had had many years earlier. Stories are not simply about the relationships characters have with other characters; they are also about the relationships that the storytellers themselves have with the characters. When storytellers are working at the top of their game – whether they be editors or sound recordists, cinematographers or designers, directors, producers or writers – they are presenting not only the emotions of the characters in the story but also their own emotional relationship with them as it develops and takes form behind, beyond and within the story.

When it comes to dramatic screen storytelling, the final cause of every creative act must be the vivid and effective realisation of emotional (meaningful) energy as built and released by the actions of characters striving to overcome problems that threaten their well-being. But to achieve this end every member of the storytelling team must be ready and able to enter the drama, which means entering into an effective and emotionally illuminating relationship with the characters. And they must be the same characters, the same characters with which all of one’s collaborators are also having a relationship!

In order to enter intimately into the emotional life of one’s characters, one must also cultivate and play out a relationship with one’s audience. The answer to the question “who is it for?” is not “everyone”. It’s not even “the 18- to 25-year-old age group” or whatever other group you have in mind. A percentage or description of a faceless mob is creatively useless from a storytelling perspective. If one is to actually enter the drama, one requires an audience. But who is one’s audience? Quite simply, it is that person to whom the story is addressed, a person with whom you are on intimate terms, like your mother or father, your son or your daughter, or lover or the ex-, or some colleague who maybe saved your life once – some person you imagine is capable of being changed or moved or healed by the experience of the story you are telling; in short, someone who needs it. Effective, character-based storytelling is impossible without this intimate sense of audience – not as a demographic but as an imaginative act.

To become one’s audience is to experience the characters and the story as one imagines one’s audience would. In becoming one’s audience one creates a contrasting perspective from which to view the action. As this happens, one also alters one’s psychical distance[2] to both the characters and the story.

To say that such an audience is unimaginable is to answer the question, ‘who is my audience?’ with the answer, “no one”. If that were truly the case then, guaranteed, no one will be listening! Not to have an audience is as meaningful as making erudite statements to an empty room. Hence, storytellers must have a relationship not only with their characters, but also with their audience. And, indeed, the two relationships continuously impact on one another. In fact, they require one another.

Some time ago, the directing lecturer here at the school, Sophia Turkiewicz[3], asked me if I might comment on a script she was writing. I warned her that I hardly liked anything I read, especially screenplays, and she explained that that’s why she’d wanted me to read it, because she was sure I’d give her an honest opinion. So I read it, and it was terrible. I can say this because Sophia’s given me permission to talk about it, which, if you understand the way the grammar works, will tell you that this particular story, as far as it goes, has a happy ending.

At our first meeting, which I thought would probably be our last, I asked Sophia to tell me what had compelled her to write such a cheap B-grade melodramatic detective story. She answered by saying that it had started out to be a story about her mother, but because so many project officers and script assessors at the various governmental funding bodies had lamented the lack of drama in it, she had assiduously worked to transform it into its present state, with only a hint of the mother-daughter relationship intact. When I pressed her for details she explained that she and her mother’s relationship had always been difficult, even painful, owing to the fact that when she was a girl, her mother had placed her in an orphanage and gone off with a man. Later, after her mother had married the guy, and he had adopted Sophia, they migrated to Australia where Sophia discovered who her real father was. Angered by the deception, she took herself off to Italy, against her mother’s wishes, to be reunited with her father and a family she had never known. It was a thousand times more interesting and powerful than what she had in her script, and I told her so. Why aren’t you writing this? I asked. And she sat there, shaking her head: “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know…..”

After that, she wrote an entirely new story based upon her mother and their relationship. It wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than what she had, which is what I told her at our second meeting. We spent a long time discussing it, or at least I did, and, by the end, Sophia went away re-invigorated. She also took with her some very vivid impressions about me, including quite a few insights concerning my individual taste and intellectual proclivities, not to mention a variety of very vivid responses I had to the characters, the depth and intensity of their actions, and how these had impacted or not impacted on me emotionally.

Then something very peculiar happened. At some point, maybe four or five weeks after our second meeting, she came back with the official 2nd draft of the new script and asked me if I’d have time to read it. Sure, I said, and put it on my desk. And there it sat, unread, for nearly two months. I didn’t even open it. It wasn’t that I was avoiding it; I was busy, I forgot. Things happen.

So time goes by and eventually Sophia comes to my office door and asks me if I’ve read the script. It was the first time I’d thought about it since she’d given it to me, and I felt a little embarrassed. Sophia, I’m so sorry, I say, some what sheepishly, I’ve been meaning to do it, but…

“No, no, no,” she interrupts, “it’s okay. I was hoping you hadn’t looked at it, cos I’ve realised there’s some parts of it that still aren’t working, and I want to fix those up first.” Saved, I thought.

Then, about three weeks later, she comes back and says, right, this is it! And this time, the 3rd draft sits on my desk for about three months, and when she finally comes to enquire, I start to say: you’re going to kill me… but she says, quickly: “It’s all right. I was having a look at it the other night, and I’m still not happy with it…”

And it goes on like this for a couple more drafts, none of which I ever read. And when the 5th draft arrives I say to her, do you know what’s happening? And she says “Yes”. And I say, what? And she says, “You’re my audience”. And I knew exactly what she meant. What a discovery!

You see, it was important that she gave me each draft, and that I kept each one on my desk where, at any moment, I could’ve easily picked it up and read it. It had to be on my desk, and it had to sit there long enough for her to start wondering, long enough for her to want to go back and pick up her own copy, and read it again; cos when there’s no feedback, when there’s been no validation of your existence, even in the form of negative criticism, you start imagining all sorts of things, like “what if it stinks?” or “what if he thinks it’s awful?” or “maybe the climax at the end of act two isn’t strong enough?” And at some stage you pick it up and look at it, not from your point of view, but from the point of view of your audience, which, in Sophia’s case, was me! And she read it as if she was me, and goes “Oh my God. No way!” Sophia loved it, but Billy – Billy sees right through it. And every time she did that she became her audience and viewed the story she had been finding from an entirely different perspective.

Now this might sound odd, I know, but it’s happened to me – as a writer – enough times to know how it works. And it does work, this way of entering the drama, this alternate vantage point that allows one to become more conscious of what is actually going on in the story by creating a contrasting perspective from which to view the characters and their actions.

Conventional wisdom conceives of character-based stories as structured presentations of emotional energy enacted by characters whose well-being is so seriously threatened by the actions of other characters that they are forced to act in order to re-establish some degree of safety, order or control. In short, the actions of the characters drive the story forward. There is, however, another component to the character-based story that is just as important, and is almost always overlooked. In character-based stories the storytellers, themselves, must transform themselves into characters, not only the characters in the script, but the characters to which the story/script is addressed, namely, its audience.

Sophia’s audience – as personified by me – allowed Sophia, the storyteller, to view herself as more than simply the story’s author. From the vantage point of audience, she also apprehended Sophia-the-storyteller as but another character among characters whose fears, prejudices, values and choices are every bit as significant and germane to the progress of the story as those actions committed by the characters whose lives are described by the script.

When storytellers view what they are doing from the perspective of audience they view it with eyes and ears that are tuned quite differently from the eyes and ears they employed as storytellers. This ability to imaginatively alter one’s psychical distance to character and story through the medium of a character external to the story’s actual narrative is central to the notion of character-based storytelling.

So there are these two primary relationships – two distinct vantage points – from which to view story: the storyteller/character relationship, which provides a vantage point or perspective from inside the story; and the storyteller/audience relationship, which provides a contrasting perspective from which one can more dispassionately apprehend the actions of the characters and the emotional gravity of those actions from outside the story. But there is also a third perspective without which the dialogic that informs story and enables storytellers to enter the drama and creatively and effectively collaborate with one’s colleagues.

Dramatic stories are dialogical by nature. They are dialogical because they are told in a context, to an audience. They are also dialogical in the sense that they are received; they come from somewhere. When I began to think about where a lot of my own stories and other writings had come from, I remembered those years I spent in the desert, sitting around campfires, listening to Pintupi elders like Tjungkarta “Nosepeg” Tjupurrula and Tutama Tjapangarti chanting the stories of the Dreamtime. Caught up in the journeys of the ancestors, the entire world became a living drama. Those trees over weren’t merely trees; they were the digging sticks of the Namputarkatjarra women. And this claypan here, this is where the patjarta man musters all them poor buggers to warn them of the danger of the evil mamu.

Whitefellas called them “dreamtime” stories, but the anarngu at Papunya, Yuendumu and throughout the western desert, call them tjukurrpa – the Pintupi word for the Aranda word altjuringa, which Spencer translated into German, which was later translated from German into the English word, “dreaming”. In fact, tjukurrpa means creation. So that the dreaming times really, more precisely, refer to creation times.

Dreaming stories are narrations, usually in song, of the coming-into-being and transformation of things. They are dramatisations concerning the origins of everything in the natural world – plants and stones, sand dunes and rock holes, mountains, animals, birds, people and their belonging places. For an initiated Aboriginal man or woman, to enter into the essence of a creation myth is to realise where that story (or dreaming) comes from. From a storyteller’s perspective – even a whitefella storyteller – to truly find a story is to intersect a story’s origins with one’s own origins, so that the two connect. This is the basis of origin-ality. To know one’s story is to know from whence it springs.

The third perspective, or relationship, without which one cannot truly enter the drama, and apart from which one’s story will have neither the power nor the impetus to either attract or initiate others into the worlds that the story inhabits has been ignorantly neglected by the screenwriting gurus. There is no commonly used expression or word that one automatically thinks of when thinking about this perspective, so when it comes to thinking up a name for it, a word that might adequately describe this relationship, that is both simple and concise, the word that came to mind –mainly because of my past experiences, and because I was working within an Australian context – was “tribe”.

Tribe, for lack of a better word, refers to the relationship that exists between the storyteller and whoever it is that is speaking through the storyteller. Who is it that is speaking through me? Or, more precisely, who am I speaking for? Who is my tribe?

To know that we are all, each of us, carriers of the wisdom of our tribe or tribes, is to become participants in a tradition that reaches out of one’s past and propels one into the “not yet”. It is to understand storytelling as a karmic dance – to realise that the story causes us as much as we cause the story. We are causes and effects of one another, and both the storyteller and the story have grown out of something much larger and deeper and more profound than is containable in mere words on a page. It is to realise that we have a responsibility, a moral and spiritual obligation, to give a voice to the voiceless, a body to the bodiless; to build courage where courage is needed, to bring light to the edge of darkness; to be and to become by virtue of our belonging, by virtue of our dedication to something greater than ourselves.

The notion of tribe is ontological. To be is to be part of a tribe. Hence, it is neither fad nor fancy, neither “front” nor fashion. Our stories, in the context of tribe, take on an entirely different meaning, and, as was the case with audience, when we view them tribally we view them and hear them with entirely different eyes and ears.

From the vantage point of tribe, our stories are gifts we receive from the ancestors and give back to the ancestors as works of love for those who gave us birth, and nurtured us; who educated and wounded us, who provided obstacles and frustrations and opportunities that enabled us to build character, to grow, to care, to create some kind of identity in the world. From the perspective of tribe, our stories are myths that challenge us to live and create more courageously, to take more humbly that which is given, and to give more generously that which can never belong to us until we give it away.

The entire idea of tribe – as it relates to what goes on in the school – was brought home to me one day last year during a storytelling workshop with the first year students. John Lonie[4] and I had screened the short film, Splintered[5], and Bill Russo had presented a thoroughly engrossing demonstration of the way in which the film’s editor had laid bare the guilt and anger between the two principal characters, two teenage mates whose lives diverge one night when a break-in goes wrong and the younger Gavin runs away, leaving his best mate, Kane, to be beaten and sentenced to a detention centre.

As I looked at the boys on the screen I was reminded of the script development process where both the writer and the director were seeking to find their own, individual stories in the story that was slowly beginning to emerge. During one of the early script conferences, both Ian and Peter admitted they had indulged in the same kind of criminal behaviour that was becoming ever more apparent in the actions of the characters in the script. Indeed, Ian – the writer – had had a friend that had been caught and incarcerated for a crime Ian was also involved in, but because Ian was a few weeks younger than his mate, he managed to avoid imprisonment, and this had made him feel extremely guilty. It hadn’t occurred to me then, but, looking at the film again, the full significance of what was confessed that day came flooding in. It was a tribal story! It was being told – or rather found – by two members of the same tribe – two young men who shared a profound tribal connection by virtue of their past involvement in juvenile crime. It wasn’t a matter of each one twisting the story to fit his own needs and prejudices; it was a question of realising that they were telling a tribal story that was common to both of them.

Like Capote had said in the movie - or the actor had said (I don’t know if Capote said it) - about Perry and himself: “he went out the back door and I went out the front”. It was Capote’s way of acknowledging that he and Perry were of the same tribe. And it was the same for the writer and director of Splintered – their characters had gone out the back door, and Ian and Peter – successful screen storytellers – had gone out the front. But each was connected to the other, tribally. And it was the tribal connection that made the potency.

Such stories come from places and associations much larger than the film makers’ individual ambitions and ego-centric identities. Others are involved, others who did not have the platform of film through which to tell their story. Those boys – whom they both had once been – were speaking through them, tribally, and Ian and Peter’s art and skill lay first of all in hearing what those boys were saying.

“It’s a tribal film,” I said to John Lonie, then to the entire class. “It’s tribal! This film works because it knows what it is, and the people through whom it came into being, who birthed it in their way, know what it is, because they lived it and went on living it in the process of finding it and turning it into a story. It is connected to them tribally.” It just came out. And Lonie looked at me, and I looked at him, and we just went BANG. My God! That’s it!

Later, thinking about the handful of marvellous films that the school has produced in the past thirty-odd years, the few that people actually remember, it came as no surprise to me to realise that films like Inja and Birthday Boy – were tribal films. They are the ones that endure.

So what is your tribe? The answer to that question may very well be the work of a lifetime, but you can start answering right now if you take the time to look and to listen and to feel. A writer’s tribe is/are those people, or that culture, association, or community that the writer identifies with by virtue of a substantial emotional connectedness. Army buddies are tribe; South Melbourne (or Sydney Swan) football supporters are tribe; non-practising Catholics and reformed alcoholics are tribe; Air Force brats are tribe; single-mums are tribe; carers are tribe.

The storyteller/tribe relationship acknowledges the fact that in order to find and effectively enter into the lives and drama of the characters, the storyteller must connect with the story through a context that is larger and more encompassing than the storyteller’s (or the audience’s) individual ego and its drive to express itself. One could say that the storyteller/tribe relationship is the super-ego of the creative process. It is the conscience that lies embedded in every part of the story, the “gristly roots of ideas that are in action”[6].

Some might want to construe tribe as a divisive force, insofar as it susceptible to fascistic manipulation. Every idea, no matter how noble, can be turned towards its negation as proof of it completeness. However, tribe as I understand it is not about dividing or separating people; it is about bringing them together; and, indeed, the tribal vantage point is the lynchpin of character-based storytelling and the art of collaboration. It’s about identity and belonging and recognising and being true to one’s origins. It has nothing to do with limitation or exclusivity and elitism, though it can surely be brutalised to serve the small-minded purposes of the bastard muses[7].

Most of the stories that fail at AFTRS – and most of them, as dramatic stories, do – do so because they are being told by storytellers who do not have a tribal affinity with either the characters or the world of the story they are trying to find. It is delusional to believe that one can tell a meaningful dramatic story that one isn’t tribally connected to. This does not, however, mean that one can never be connected to it. If one becomes so obsessed with the characters or situation in which they find themselves, that one cannot help oneself, that one must tell the story regardless, then one can also find ways of being initiated into the tribe whose story one wants to tell. If you aren’t tribally connected to a story, a process of initiation might enable you to become so intimately connected to the world that is the characters’ world that one lives in at as the characters do themselves. It’s what used to be called research, which is about connecting with something ever more deeply. A meditation in which one eventually merges with the subject.

So we tried this thing that I decided to call a Tribal Workshop, and over three days I sat in a room with all of our first-year directors, writers and producers, and listened and watched as they told stories about themselves through the medium of dramatic scenes that each of the participants had individually selected and brought to class.

Here’s how it worked. The group was divided into pairs. No two directors, writers or producers were paired together. If I was a director, I would be paired with either a producer or a writer. So let’s say my partner is a producer. What I have to do is pick a scene that I feel, from my perception of this producer, represents his or her tribal identity. And the producer does the same for me, choosing a scene they imagine represents my tribal identity. Then I pick a scene I believe represents my own tribal identity; and they pick one that represents theirs. So between us we’ve selected four scenes. When the big group comes together, our scenes are selected to be screened first so I screen the scene I chose for the producer and talk about why I chose it; and then the producer replies to what I have said and the group asks both of us questions if it feels like it. Then I screen the scene I chose for myself and talk about that, and the group asks me questions. And then the producer screen his scene that represents me, and after discussion screens the scene about himself, followed by more discussion. And it goes on like until every scene has been screened and discussed.

The thing that amazes everyone, because they hardly knew each other at this stage of the year, was how insightful it all was. It was so overwhelming that hardly an hour went by that people weren’t in tears. Not because they were frightened or nervous, but simply because someone had actually seen them.

Well, the dramatic scenes that grew out of tribal workshop represent some of the most astonishing work that has been done here. Each sequence of scenes, in its own way, is an example of an attempt to tell stories that rarely get told in this place. Told, not for show or to impress or because they’d look good on a show reel, but because the stories themselves represented aspects of the identity of the people who were caught up in the act of finding them. Even when a story didn’t quite fit the tribal identity of every collaborator, the ones who were tribally connected took responsibility for initiating the others into that world.

So I leave you to consider these three primary relationships and their efficacy in the creation of effective collaborations and the making of compelling dramatic stories. These three perspectives from which storytellers might view their characters and enter ever more deeply into their dramas will always inform the very best character-based stories. These three primary perspectives that form the basis of a mediumistic approach to story telling allow every storyteller working in concert with one another to conduct a story’s energy from inside the drama, not at arm’s length, but in relationship with one’s characters as well as one’s audience, one’s tribe and one’s collaborators.

We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.

But just how much can someone belong to tribe that they aren’t born into? Several years ago I wrote a collection of poems called Singing the Snake. That chronicled my fours years living at Papunya Aboriginal Settlement in Central Australia. A number of publishers read the manuscript in the years after I returned to Sydney, and for a variety of reasons decided not to publish it. One even proclaimed that it was “racist”. The company that eventually committed to it had already passed on twice, but their reader, Les Murray[8], had encouraged me to try again, and shortly after, it was accepted and became the fastest selling book of modern Australian poetry ever printed by Angus & Robertson.

Several years prior to the book coming out, I was visiting Sydney with three Aboriginal elders from Papunya. Mick Namarari[9], Tutama Tjapangarti[10] and Nosepeg Tjupurrula[11], found themselves accompanying me to a poetry reading at the Café L’Absurd in Balmain. I was one of the invited guests, and they had never been to poetry reading before. As I finished my set, or just close to finishing it, Old Mick got up, frowning, and sauntered out the back door. I was quietly horrified. Oh my God, I thought, maybe it’s true. Maybe these poems are offensive. When I finished, I went back to the table and sat down. No one said a thing. On the pretext of going to the toilet I went looking for Mick and found him returning from outside, down the long narrow corridor at the back of the café. I suddenly realised he was coming back from the toilet. As he came up to me he slowly reached out and took hold of my sleeve with his thumb and forefinger, stopping me, and very gently pulling me close so that he could whisper in my ear. “When you were talking,” he said, “I was happy”.

It was the best and most generous criticism my poetry ever received, and was also as I have come to learn, acknowledgement of the fact that, at least as far as Mick was concerned, I had been initiated into the tribe.

______________________________________
[1] Film and television editor (credits include Blue Murder, Young Lions, Two Friends, Crocodile Dreaming, etc) and formerly head of editing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS).
[2] See Bullough, Edward. “'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” rom British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 5 (1912), pp. 87-117 or at http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r9.html
[3] Sophia's television credits include adult and children's drama (Something in the Air, Mirror Mirror, Escape of the Artful Dodger, The Wayne Manifesto), telemovies (Time's Raging, I've Come About the Suicide) as well as the feature film Silver City, which was screened internationally and was the recipient of 3 AFI Awards.
[4] John Lonie is a novelist and screenwriter, historian. Formerly head of screenwriting at AFTRS.
[5] Award-winning short film (9 mins), produced by AFTRS students in their first year, directed by peter Templeman, written by Ian Irvine, produced by Stuart Parkyn.
[6] The German anthropologist, Leo Frobenius used the term paideuma for the tangle or complex of the enrooted ideas of any culture and period. The American poet, Ezra Pound, employed the word to denote “the gristly roots of ideas that are in action."
[7] Sentimentality, Pornography, Propaganda, and Violence
[8] Well-known and critically acclaimed Australian poet and essayist, author of more than thirty books of verse and prose.
[9] Born c. 1926 at Marnpi in the sand-hill country south-west of Mt. Rennie, Mick is a one of the major artists of the Papunya/Tula school of dot painters.
[10] Born in the early 1920s in the area north of the Petermann Ranges, Tutama’s pencil drawings provide “visual poems” in Singing the Snake (Angus & Robertson, 1990).
[11] Painter, actor, storyteller, guide, translator and full-time raconteur, Nosepeg was the first tribal Aboriginal man Elizabeth the Second ever met. On meeting her in Toowoomba in the early 1950s and being introduced to the Queen of England, he replied, “Really! I’m Nosepeg; King of the Pintupi.” The Queen’s response is not recorded.

A MOST DIFFICULT ART

2010-09-02T23:31:00.000+10:00

The Art of Reading A Script

A script is NOT a read; it's a re-read. The art of reading of script is a creative act. It is an active art.

One reads a script in order to EXPERIENCE the characters and their world. It is as much an aural experience as it is a visual one, maybe more so. To read effectively is to hear and see the characters in their immediacy, and to always remain open and sensitive not only to what they do and say but what is implied by what they do and say. When one reads from "inside the story world", rather than as an unwilling or gawking spectator, one intersects and interacts with the characters at approximately the same emotional depth at which they are operating. We read a script in order to uncover the TRUTH of the actions that comprise the story.

We are not looking for OUR truths, or the truths that we believe our society or the imagined society of the writer is trying to uphold.

We are looking for the truth of the script… the sum of those almost indecipherable moments of grace by which the story becomes more than the sum of its parts.

To read the entire article go to http://www.wheresthedrama.com/howtoreadascript.htm

RECOMMENDED SHORT DRAMAS

2010-04-13T07:49:00.000+10:00

A short film is not a miniature feature. It operates, rather, by an odd sort of logic that when successful rarely propels its audience towards the kind of expected and satisfying narrative resolution that so often characterises longer-form drama. Often, the resolution of a well-told short-form drama occurs in the mind of the viewer rather than on the screen.

In the short-form drama, the problem and the character form a relationship that leads the audience towards a set of assumptions and expectations (based primarily upon the audience’s prejudices) about what that relationship actually means. CHARACTER is understood as an expression of THEME.

In short-form drama, the character/problem relationship is re-contextualised or amplified in such a way that it subverts the audience’s beliefs about what the character/problem relationship really means, thus propelling the audience into playing out the drama of the new meaning well beyond the end of the actual film. Hence, the plot becomes IMPLICIT.

To view some of the best short-form dramas, click on the LINK

http://www.wheresthedrama.com/apps/videos/channels/show/1158291-recommended-short-films

And, if you have a short film that you believe is DRAMATIC, please join WHERE'S THE DRAMA? and post your contribution.

INTERROGATING YOUR SCREENPLAY

2010-03-14T08:16:00.000+11:00

WHERE'S THE DRAMA? & WHY DO I CARE?

The DRAMA REPORT is a diagnostic tool for examining and identifying the dramatic strengths and weaknesses of every draft of your screenplay. The events and character actions (including dialogue) that are present in your screenplay are the basis of the grammar by which a story becomes emotionally compelling, or meaningful. Examine your screenplay to see how clearly it provides answers to the following questions.

Producers, directors and others will find a useful tool in this report, however, the first two questions are for the SCREENWRITER ALONE to answer. Vivid and accurate answers to these questions are an essential prerequistie for any writer who intends to work as a medium for character and story.

ACCESS THE QUESTIONS at THE DRAMA REPORT

MY CREATIVE PROCESS

2010-03-08T09:10:00.000+11:00

I begin with research, research, research, not so much because I am interested in gathering information but because I want to be free of it. I look for contradictions, confusions, chaos. I court them. I love to find experts who disagree. It is really a kind of meditative process. When the "facts" and "counter facts" reach critical mass, they explode, dissolve, and what I am left with is the hint of a voice, a gesture, an impression I can coax into light and sound.

The early drafts of the script are mere lures - super-structures into which I pour my own ideas, propositions, suggestions, nuances, in order to draw out the persons (and voices) that lurk in the dark. Some are more eager than others to tell their stories. Others less trusting. Some extremely shy.

I LISTEN. Listen for the characters to interject, disagree, champ at the bit of the script I have so cold-bloodedly fashioned from the conflicting opinions of research and forgetfulness. I listen, listen for the broad rhythms of speech and silence, sensitising myself to the physical movements that accompany the sounds, learning the characters' pecularities. Some times these come stampeding out and I get carried away and go on writing way past the actual stampede. Next day when I return to the script-in-progress, I see it is only the actual stampede I can use; the willful parts must be deleted.

I listen and refine. Listen and argue. Listen and dispose of more and more of the cold-blooded wilfullness. It is a stripping away. Stripping away the writerliness, the literariness, all that is an expression of my ego and fears and not the egos of the characters whose voices are a part of me and somehow not me.

I guess what I am talking about is the unconscious. One enters into a kind of dream, a reverie; communes with spirits. Sometimes, often, their voices are audible. I have frequently been heard talking "to myself"... actually I am talking to "them". In the midst of my luring we enter into a kind of marriage. They become more real, more substantial, more interesting, than the people one stands in the queue with at K-Mart. One begins to feel rather fictional oneself in the presence of those heavily materialised masses trudging down Main Street. One loses the self one shows to the world and enters their world, their voices, their fears, their hope.

The Pound play was a four year marriage in which we (Pound and I) often fought most hideously. He offering, then withdrawing assistance. Back and forth. I never bowed to his threats, but I learned his idiosyncracies enough to know how to deal with him. We grew to understand one another. A kind of love-hate relationship. A marriage. When the play was finally produced it was like some horrendous separation. Neither of us wanted it to end quite so soon. Maybe there was more that could have - or should have - been said. But it was over. A divorce without mental cruelty, other than the self-imposed cruelty which occasions all creative acts.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking
http://stonekingpages.webs.com/sixteenwordsforwater.htm

A NOTE ON THE PLAY

In 1943, the American poet, Ezra Pound, was indicted by the United States government on the charge of treason. It was alleged that Pound, an American citizen, had made anti-American broadcasts over Italian radio during wartime, and that these same broadcasts had given "aid and comfort" to the enemy. By war's end Pound found himself in the custody of U.S. marshals.

Mindful of the political hysteria of the times, and fearing for Pound's life, his wife, friends and colleagues, urged him to enter a plea of insanity as a means of escaping trial and the possibility of a death penalty. This he did, and the court subsequently upheld the plea. However, instead of releasing him into the care of his wife as had been expected, the government chose to confine him at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., an institution that housed hundreds of the criminally insane. Pound - "one of the great literary figures of our time" - would remain incarcerated at St Elizabeth’s for nearly thirteen years.

Sixteen Words for Water takes up Pound's life in the final days of his "imprisonment", when the balance between life and death had reached its most critical point. The Ezra Pound of the present play must choose between sanity and the possibility of the electric chair, or insanity and the surety of safety at the expense of freedom. In the midst of this, he finds himself invaded by strange thoughts - memories of the ancient Aboriginal myth of the Wandjina... the creative spirits of the Dreamtime who fashioned the world out of words and who, in the act of naming, threatened the world with chaos.