What Really Scares Me

When I started studying screenwriting, there were a few rules that they drilled into us.

1) Show don’t tell.

Film/video is a visual medium. This means that screenplays need to tell stories visually, via characters taking actions on screen that drive the plot. Other versions of this include “Action is character,” and, “People are what they do not what they say,” and like any old saws, they get really annoying when people say them because they can’t come up with their own insights, but that doesn’t make them untrue. You’re writing a movie, not a novel, not a play, so write it in a way that we get to see stuff happen.

The corollary of this is if you’re using dialogue too much to convey stuff like exposition or backstory or god forbid subtext, not only is it unnatural — because people don’t talk that way — it’s bad writing. Write a scene in which we can see it instead. Dialogue can be action, when one character is “convincing” or “mansplaining to” another character, but the words people say on screen should always be doing something rather than telling the audience anything. This goes doubly for voice over, which is even more artificial and will always in some way take you out of the movie. If that’s a choice, like having the character talk to the audience and put us in their unique point of view because that’s central to the show/film overall (Dexter), then by all means do it. Just don’t use it as a crutch to convey story or information that you should be conveying some other way.

Have I written a pilot in which every episode begins with a voice over from a different character’s point of view? Yes I have, but that was an integral part of the concept: a show about the characters’ failed expectations at midlife, that shows where each character always thought they’d be by now vs. where they actually are. Did it make me itchy when I decided to do it? Yep. But but I felt like I had a good reason, and years later, I still like it, so I’ve kept it. Does it work? Meh. Nobody has taken an interest in that pilot, but it could also be because, well, it’s about four middle-aged women.

2) Start and end your story in the right place.

This is really just to say don’t have too many dreams, fantasy sequences or flashbacks. If you have to keep flashing back to the past, maybe you should have started your story there instead of where you did. If you have to keep showing us someone’s fears or fantasies, particularly in their dreams, that shit needs to be revealed in action.

Again, of course I’ve done all of these things. That dramedy pilot with the middle aged women and their voice overs? Each episode also starts with a fantasy sequence. (Yeah, I really wanted to fuck that one up!) My thriller pilot about the head of antiquities at Sotheby’s searching for lost treasures? We have flashbacks to the history of those treasures. My dark comedy feature about a writer who has to murder people to get inspired? Her escalating nightmares about what she’s done play a big part in her character’s downward spiral. But in all of those cases, my trespass is a conscious choice that’s integral to the show and the story, rather than a crutch doing the work I should be doing elsewhere.

3) Kill your darlings

This just means that if something doesn’t doesn’t move the script’s story forward in some way, you need to cut it out, even if it’s something you think is so brilliant it makes you look like a genius. It doesn’t. It can be too much clever dialogue that you don’t need so it ends up bogging things down (guilty): slash it. It can be those really really fascinating factoids you found out in your research and desperately want to share with everyone via those scenes are plot tangents that are just getting in the way (super guilty): ditch it or put it in a future episode. It can mean that you have side characters that people can’t keep straight because they don’t do enough (guilty), or who everyone loves but are distracting from the main character’s journey so people can’t figure out what it is (guilty a million times in every early draft): cut ‘em or combine ‘em.

This is one rule that I try to stick to, and one of the advantages of getting feedback from different people at different points in the process (and by “advantages” I mean, “justifications for self-inflicted pain”) is that there are always more darlings to cut. Like I directed a scene from one of my scripts recently, and I could see when actors had to read it that some of the dialogue was a mouthful (and they also told me it was, so I really couldn’t fail to get the message). You don’t necessarily have to kill every one of your darlings, because, again, the rules are made to be broken, you just have to know that you’re breaking them and have a really good reason.

Now, I’m critical of everything I watch, which is a downside of being a writer, and also of growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, where apathy and coming up with mean things to say about people were the highly-prized skillsets. And most of the shows and movies I see that are bad enough for me to stop watching them have egregious plot flaws, or undeveloped cardboard-cutout characters designed to do whatever the plot wants them to do just to heighten the capital-D DRAMA. UGH.

But when these smaller but super simple rules get violated by a show or movie that could work so much better if it didn’t, it does make me a little crazy — especially when I see it happening on projects that I work on. One recent example is Dying for Sex — which, let me be clear, is a terrific and unique show. I was on it for a few days and truly enjoyed watching it come together, between the great script and the show runner coming in to beautifully tweak scenes, sometimes via adding lines, sometimes via improv. But when I saw it on TV, I was just a tad less thrilled — because they’d added a voice over. Having only worked on it for a couple of days, I did have a moment of, Uh am I hallucinating, or…? But my friend who worked on the whole thing confirmed it, as did articles about the show: the VO was added to the pilot during the edit, so they would “not have people running for the hills.” I mean, given that this is a dramedy about a person dying of cancer who was also sexually abused as a child, which is a tough sell by anyone’s standard, I think that providing the main character’s dark and funny perspective was not a bad solution. And yet, watching the pilot, I was hyper-aware that I was being told things in the voice over that I was also seeing on screen, and I hate that. It gets better in later episodes, for sure, but I can’t help but wonder how much more elegant the series would have been without it. Could they have started the story with humor in an earlier (or later) less tragic moment, or just trusted that we, as an audience, could make it to the crazy-funny of the sex scenes in episode 2? We’ll never know.

A far worse example is a show I only worked on for one day and haven’t watched, so take it with a massive grain of salt, but on Netflix’s The Night Agent, characters were speaking the subtext constantly. It’s both boring and makes scenes stupidly long — which, admittedly, is something I’m hyper aware of as a boom op in a way that nobody else is. But I’m not the only one; again, it’s in the reviews, and apparently this is a phenomenon that happens enough on their shows to be described as “Netflix-y.” According to this damning article among others, Netflix is specifically requiring screenwriters to put exposition in dialogue for “casual viewing,” which basically means for people who aren’t paying attention. Apparently, in the stats they finally started releasing in 2023, a “view” doesn’t mean watching the whole thing, oh no, it’s when people only watch for a couple minutes, or even roll into whatever’s next on autoplay for a few seconds because they’re asleep. That time, no matter how short, is still added on to a piece of content’s “total viewing hours,” so they can claim streaming successes. According to the bean-counters, those beans count.

Then there’s the trend of stuff becoming too long that everyone talks about. So many movies made by big “auteurs” these days are three hours plus, I’m guessing because final cut is in their contract. Which, for a long time, when studios were butchering movies by forcing them into the 90-minute box, was not at all a bad thing, and meant respecting the creator. Unfortunately, now, the pendulum has swung toward just respecting self-indulgent famous directors who don’t have to take feedback from anyone that might make their movies better (by and large, not incidentally, the same variety of white-dudes-that-nobody-says-no-to that are currently running our society and government). But we are also seeing it in television. I don’t necessarily blame streaming, because I think that the freedom of cable and streamers to make series only as long as they needed to be, rather than fill 22 episodes a season, created Peak TV. Especially when a show is not a procedural (Ah, remember that?) a season is so much better if each episode is written based not on filling the number of episodes that need to be delivered, but because it’s the best length for that storyline to play out in. Let the whiny philistines complain about their favorite series having only seven or eight episodes, I’m telling you that those series would not be that good if they were longer. Which is now being proven, as streamers try to develop formulae to bring in and hold on to viewers. Watching a plot go in circles by episode six because the writers had to fill ten episodes has been driving me bonkers with a number of shows that I haven’t worked on but have been watching and really don’t want to give up on, but oh good lord please let it get to the end already.

The truly terrible thing about all of these trends is not that they are training writers to write badly to satisfy what their over-consolidated and over-paid boards and C-suites want — because let’s face it, this has always happened in Hollywood — but that we are also training the audience. New generations that are growing up not going to the movies and watching their “content” on YouTube and TikTok on their phones, that’s happening, and that’s bad. But deciding to cater to those audiences by dumbing down the content to meet them where they are? That’s truly frightening.

Documentaries were the canary in the coal mine for a lot of this. When Netflix ordered a season of Making a Murderer — which, I know from interviews with the filmmakers, was originally just going to be a film — I think we were all like, Yay! Docs are finally getting the respect they deserve! Then that series was ten episodes that I couldn’t make it through, and another season which I knew I would never turn on. Tiger King was the same. Adding voice over was another ask cable and streamers started making of acquisitions in the aughts, often convincing filmmakers to put themselves in the story as the first-person narrator, to give people a “relatable” guide through the story. This led to a big shift away from verité — having the story fully play out in action that viewers have to actually pay attention to to follow, as in the famous films of the Maysles brothers, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Barbara Kopple — and toward having everything explained. Now, plenty of great docs are not verité, and I’ve used interviews as VO in all of my documentary films — nobody wants to watch a talking head when you can visually illustrate their point with something better. I don’t even have a problem with scripted VO if, again, it’s an integrated part of the storytelling (everything Ken Burns has ever done). But when you graft it on at the request of someone higher up the food chain because they don’t have confidence that the audience will be engaged enough to follow what’s going on, that’s when you destroy a medium. Which cable and streaming was starting to do, and then, when the industry contracted, dropped everything that wasn’t true crime, making documentary crater. Now with government funding from CPB, NEA and NEH wiped out, the picture is grim. Five or ten years from now, will there be an audience for documentaries at all?

And now with the industry applying much of that same shitty thinking to all film and TV, will we do the same to narrative? (Or should I say, given the rise of Verticals, complex narratives that don’t rely on clichés and last longer than two minutes?) I understand the fear studios have, not knowing where things are heading as the landscape changes. As a crew person, I, too, am afraid of not having enough projects to work on, and as a screenwriter who isn’t a proven (white dude) creator or and hasn’t written a novel, less content means less opportunity. But we know there are always down periods in our industry, and things can turn around again. On the other hand, there’s a point at which you are not just dumbing stuff down for your audience, you’re making the audience dumb.

We can see that failing to raise our expectations of government and politicians and become active in civil society is leading to the loss our democracy in real time. In the same way, if we don’t set our sights on making media that challenges audiences to think, or even requires them to pay attention, those audiences will lose the ability to do that. And there is no future for visual storytelling if we create an audience that can’t follow a story.

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