Lesson 7 – The Characters

· Create mentor characters who help the protagonist and, in so doing, articulate the theme or message of the story.

· Create supporting characters that help raise the stakes for the main characters, that mirror their problems or actions in someway, or that add dimensionality or atmosphere to your story.

· Utilize the character diatribe in developing your characters and their objectives.

Reading Assignment

Movie Viewing Assignment

After you have read the reading assignments and the Lesson Lecture, watch the films MEAN STREETS and THELMA AND LOUISE. Then read the Lesson Lecture. You may want to re-watch portions of the movies and make notes about the concepts presented to you in this lesson.

Lecture

Protagonists

Creating principal characters is perhaps the most enjoyable part of screenwriting. Often, we find ourselves creating a principal character (or protagonist) that is a thinly disguised version of ourselves—the mouthpiece for our own self-expression, feelings, thoughts, and experiences. For many of us, the alter-ego character is the easiest and most exhilarating kind of character to create, because we know this particular individual’s background and internal feelings inside-out, and we have a strong desire to express those feelings.

However, there is often a tendency for a writer to forget to create a complete emotional roadmap for the alter-ego character—a full charting of the character’s polar attitudes and backstory that would help an audience understand the individual. This is understandable given that a writer may unconsciously leave out important information that the audience needs, because the writer is already so innately familiar with that emotional territory and is not constructing the character’s profile from scratch.

Another challenge to creating the alter-ego character is that we often write about ourselves without enough self-knowledge and honesty in assessing our experiences and the meaning of those experiences. A writer that writes about him or her self must think long and hard about the universality of the feelings and experiences of one’s alter-ego (we’ll learn more about universality in Lesson 8). The character must be created and revealed from an objective story-telling position. Sometimes it is more difficult to create characters that represent ourselves, simply because it is harder to see ourselves with clarity and objectivity.

For instance, a novice writer who hopes to express the pain of past heartbreak by creating a broken-hearted alter-ego protagonist who exacts revenge of some kind upon a lover may not be dealing objectively with the meaning of heartbreak in our lives. A more truthful retelling of such an experience may lie in charting the course of an alter-ego character who grows stronger and more resilient through the experience of heartbreak, rather than working out one’s current personal anger or resentment, writing a fictitious story with an improbable plot in which things unfold in the way one wished they had in real life. We’ve all seen mediocre movies in which a happy ending or unlikely turn of events seems tacked on to the film, or in which the protagonist seems fully developed, but the other characters come off as one-dimensional. This is often due to the fact that the writer has not approached characterization from an objective and honest standpoint.

Many writers find it more comfortable writing about someone they have known or found fascinating in their own lives or in history. Writers explore the reasons behind the actions of a real person by creating a similar character or composite character and thrusting that character into certain situations or conflicts. We put ourselves in this individual’s shoes and imagine the feelings that the character would have and actions he or she would take in those situations. For example, writer/director John Sayles traces his interest in writing and making the film MATEWAN to his having run across a mention of a real man, Sid Hatfield (a member of the Hatfield family of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud), in a history of the coal mining labor conflicts of West Virginia. Sid Hatfield had been involved in a bloody shoot-out during the union struggles in the coal mining town of Matewan. This man captured Sayles’ imagination, and eventually became the basis for one of the important principal characters in MATEWAN.

If storytelling has a positive function it’s to put us in touch with other people’s lives, to help us connect and draw strength or knowledge from people we’ll never meet, to help us see beyond our own experience. The people I read about in the history books and the people I met in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia had important stories to tell and I wanted to find a way to pass them on.

--John Sayles, Thinking in Pictures

Whatever the basis for your protagonist(s), he or she must be someone an audience will care about. If not, it will be very difficult to create a compelling and plausible storyline around that character. No matter how many fantastic and enthralling events or plot actions happen in a movie, an audience will not be pulled along and engrossed in the story without a dramatic through-line firmly rooted in character. Even in an action disaster film such as TITANIC has a dramatic through-line (that has little to do with the actual sinking of the Titanic). Though the action sequences of the sinking ship were spectacular, indeed, it was primarily the character-driven story of Rose and her transformation from a spoiled and willful society girl into a strong, committed survivor willing to sacrifice for love that kept audiences returning to this film time and again.

The Transformational Arc

Transformation is the operative word when it comes to creating a plausible protagonist. The attitudes of a character must shift from one point to another through the overcoming of doubts, fear or cowardice, so-called better judgment, or emotional paralysis. Your textbook author tracks this movement as a shift from a beginning position to a moderate position to an extreme position. In Play Directing, Francis Hodge describes it as a change in polar attitudes (towards others, oneself, or to one’s situation). The attitudes held at the beginning of a story shift to a new set of polar attitudes at the end. Whichever way you prefer to envision this vital dynamic character metamorphosis, it is invaluable to pinpoint this change in the early stages of developing your screenplay. It will help you know where you are headed at all times.

Absorbing human flaws help an audience identify with a protagonist. They provide a place from which the character may grow, and point toward a direction in which they may change, overcoming external and internal obstacles. Even action films have emotionally flawed protagonists who must tap nascent resources deep within themselves in order to achieve their objectives. This quality of possibility within a flawed character reverberates for audiences; it gives them a sense that they, too, are capable of becoming better people, transcending their own flaws, making more honorable choices or smarter decisions, performing more heroic or ethical actions, or resolving internal and external conflicts more responsibly.

Motivation and Objective

The tension that resides between the motivation behind a protagonist’s actions and the articulated or obvious objective of a protagonist becomes the push or the transformational arc of a character. What a character thinks or says that he or she wants (an objective) may actually be very different from what they really want (motivation). In the film MEAN STREETS, for instance, Charlie articulates a desire to do the right thing at every level of his life–to keep his friends at peace, to have a life with Theresa, to fulfill his neighborhood patron duties for his godfather-like uncle. But these objectives are in direct conflict with one another:

· Theresa wants Charlie to separate from his friends and his uncle’s business.

· Johnny Boy won’t pay his debt to Michael and Michael wants to teach Johnny Boy a lesson for dissing him, pulling Charlie apart in their struggle of wills.

· Charlie’s friends lure him away from any emotional commitment to Theresa, forcing Charlie to keep their relationship a secret.

· Charlie’s uncle disapproves of Theresa because she is epileptic (reflecting his old-world superstition that epileptics are not right in the head).

· Charlie’s uncle disapproves of Charlie’s small time thug pals—especially Johnny Boy.

But the motivation behind Charlie’s desire to do the right thing has more to do with his own internal circumspection and soul-searching. Charlie is motivated in his pursuit of his objectives by a deep spiritual crisis (remember cosmic conflict in Lesson 6?). This deeper struggle is revealed to us in Charlie’s first voiceover words that seem to emanate from an unconscious dream state from which he wakens moments later.

You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets, you do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

This is the underlying motivational dilemma that Charlie faces throughout the film as he pursues his objectives. How can he reconcile his Catholic upbringing and belief in the forgiveness of sin with the realities of life in the streets of New York? Meaningless religious activities are useless to Charlie; he wants something more tangible to manifest his worthiness for forgiveness. Like the generation of young people of his time, Charlie questions everything—his religion, the traditions of cultural patronage, the racial divisions of society—and that underlying doubt forces him to struggle with the conflicting objectives of his very complicated life and relationship webs.

Well-developed and believable protagonists are the life blood of a film, but it is crucial that you not ignore other important types of characters. Even the most provocative or sympathetic protagonists cannot carry a story alone. They need a little help from some friends (as in MEAN STREETS)and possibly an enemy or two.

Catalytic Characters

Often it is another character, not just a situation or event, that helps to gets things started in a movie. This character may make demands upon a protagonist or urge them toward some action. The catalytic character is one who forces the protagonist toward some objective or transformation. Some examples follow:

· The catalytic character, Jack in TITANIC, forces Rose to come to terms with her desire to escape from high society and to be an artist. Through his death, he compels her to be strong enough to survive the disaster and live a more fully realized life.

· Luke Skywalker in STAR WARS, is forced into action by the catalytic characters, Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who call him to arms, reinforced by Luke’s discovery that his aunt and uncle have been murdered by the forces of the Empire.

Catalytic characters can sometimes be confused with protagonists because they exert such a strong influence upon plot action. Be sure to delineate for yourself the purpose of these highly salient and memorable characters. Often catalysts seem to draw focus in the early action of a story, but that focus must dim at some point, once the characters have fulfilled their catalytic purpose, so as not to overwhelm the action or transformational arc of the protagonist.

It is useful to remember that if William Shakespeare had not killed off the fascinating catalytic character of Mercutio, the play Romeo and Juliet might very well have ended up being entitled Mercutio. In the opening scenes, it is Mercutio who teases and chastises Romeo’s fickle heart, pushing Romeo toward a different kind of obsession with one girl, Juliet. Ironically, it is Mercutio’s accidental death at the hands of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, that causes Romeo to become a murderer himself, leading ultimately to the tragic denouement of Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio’s purpose in Romeo and Juliet was to catalyze Romeo into action. Once he had fulfilled that purpose, he no longer was needed. Thus, exits Mercutio.

Antagonists

In order to create strong conflict for a good movie story, we often need a character that represents an obstacle to a main character’s objective (especially if the conflict is not entirely rooted in some internal issue of the protagonist). Thus, we create a villain or antagonist--someone who thwarts the protagonist in the achieving of his or her objective.

The best antagonists are those who are multi-dimensional and realistic. Audiences become bored with cliché-ridden stock villains whose predictable actions stem from only superficial or obvious motivations such as greed or unsubstantiated evil. Although there is much comfort in the moral clarity of good vs. evil themes of American westerns, the finest of this genre are those with fully-fleshed villains—villains with realistic motivations and complicated personalities. The empty motivation of an ambiguous group of murderous Indian savages in a mediocre western cannot compare to the complexity and defiant intensity of the Comanche chief, Scar, in Frank S. Nugent’s THE SEARCHERS, whose cause seems almost sympathetic next to the hard-bitten racism and antisocial tendencies of the Indian-killer protagonist, Ethan (John Wayne). The film is much less about good vs. evil, than it is about the healing of a man’s soul, and the complexity of the antagonist, Scar, leaves us room for that understanding.

It is worthwhile to return to Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW to remember how we felt about the antagonist in that film—Thorwald, the hen-pecked husband-turned-murderer who lives across the courtyard from Jeff. Why do we feel somewhat sorry for Mr. Thorwald? Because we see him depicted early on as an unappreciated, homely, and sad everyman similar to ourselves and others. We are also kept guessing as to his true culpability in the disappearance of his wife, through the writer’s creation of red herrings. Even in the final, suspenseful moments of the film, as the desperate Thorwald advances upon Jeff in his apartment, we still feel torn between sympathy for the man and anxiety for Jeff’s safety, as Thorwald reveals his own fears.

What do you want from me? Your friend, the girl, could have turned me in. Why didn’t she? What is it you want? A lot of money? I don’t have any money. Say something. Say something! Tell me what you want?!

Our mixed responses to this man’s sad desperation resonates further when we consider Jeff’s internal conflicts about relationships, especially his conflicted feelings about marriage to Lisa. Hitchcock and his screenwriter, John Michael Hayes, have created a believable and sympathetic antagonist whose pent-up anger and murderous actions mirror Jeff’s own resistance to the institution of marriage.

In the film MEAN STREETS, we are presented with even more complex catalytic and antagonistic characters that, together, create enormous obstacles in the path of Charlie’s objectives. Martin Scorcese and Mardick Martin (director and screenwriter) have woven a very intricate emotional tangle for the audience by placing two of Charlie’s closest friends—Johnny Boy and Michael—into a dynamic catalyst/antagonist relationship. The fact that these two characters are in conflict with each other puts Charlie under intense emotional strain. Yet we can understand the positions of each. We’re enthralled with the brash, rebellious, and mercurial Johnny Boy, yet we can sympathize with the posturing and respect-hungry Michael, just trying to do his small-time crime business in a friendly yet deadly way in the mean streets of New York’s Little Italy. We are as torn as Charlie is as to which of these characters’ interests he should help or protect. And Michael is not an easy villain to pigeonhole. His antagonist status becomes even less pronounced when we see all three--Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Michael--react to a larger, external enemy which they share in common—the police. Thus, when Michael shoots Johnny Boy in the end and sends Charlie and Theresa into a terrifying car crash, we don’t find ourselves hating Michael and wanting Charlie to exact revenge (a predictable response to a less nuanced and obvious villain in, say, a mediocre crime movie or action blockbuster). Instead, we learn something of the endless spiral of violence that is founded on the misguided notions of manhood and power that are endemic to our urban landscapes and underworld communities. As you can see, a multi-faceted and sympathetic villain leaves room for the audience to comprehend a larger theme or message.

Archetypes

There are usually many supporting roles in well-written movie scenarios (hence, all those awards for best supporting players). The existence of these characters often arises from a need to raise the stakes for a protagonist by creating a character for whom the protagonist is responsible or to whom the protagonist has strong emotional ties—an innocent child, a mother, a romantic love interest, or maybe even a devoted pet—archetypal characters who are vulnerable to the antagonist’s actions or to the protagonist’s mistakes.

As we get deeper into our storyline, we might run into the need for some help from a character that assists the protagonist toward his or her objective--a mentor who articulates for the protagonist the why behind the achievement of an objective. In so doing, these characters often articulate the theme of the story (we will look at this function in more detail in Lesson Eight). Many times, these characters do double duty as catalysts. In STAR WARS, for instance, the robots are the innocents and Princess Leia is the love interest. Luke is enabled and urged on in his objective by his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Leia and Kenobi both function as catalysts, while helping to raise the emotional stakes for Luke Skywalker as he stalks the Empire villains. When Leia or Kenobi are in jeopardy, Luke is motivated and renewed in his commitment to his quest.

You may find that in order to give a sense of reality and atmosphere to a movie, you need even smaller characters that give dimension and texture to the overall setting. Often thematic ideas are developed using these stock characters. The use of mythic stock characters or archetypes is well put forth in your textbook (page 143). Look for archetypes in movies you’ve seen and in your own work. Be aware of the short hand signals and expectations that these characters provide when they are introduced in a story. Do you see any of the following?

· The wise old man or woman or mentor/teacher (like Eli in WITNESS or Obi-Wan Kenobi in STAR WARS)

· The good mother or nurse or nurturing female (like Elma in MATEWAN or Calpurnia in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD)

· The shadow figure or evil one, often reflecting the darker side of a protagonist (like Darth Vader in STAR WARS or Thorwald in REAR WINDOW.

· The trickster, joker, or clown (like Mercutio in ROMEO AND JULIET or Johnny Boy in MEAN STREETS)

· The lover, mistress, or paramour (like Theresa in MEAN STREETS or Lisa in REAR WINDOW)

Dual Protagonists

A popular genre in our culture—the buddy film—presents us with dual protagonists, either of whom might be looked upon as a supporting player to the other. As your textbook author points out, these characters are confidantes to one another—they become the revelatory means by which we know each character more fully.

Often confidantes and dual protagonists mirror each other’s growth. They may trade functions, situations, and emotional reckonings during the course of the story. In the "buddy film" THELMA AND LOUISE, we watch the two women exchange roles within their transformational arcs. Louise is tough, world-wise, effective and proactive; Thelma is brow-beaten by a husband, ditsy, and ineffective. Louise plays catalyst to Thelma’s forward movement, forcing her to go on a trip to the mountains, pushing a freedom that backfires when Thelma is almost raped in a parking lot. Later, when their money has been stolen and escape seems utterly hopeless, Louise takes on the weak, passive nature of Thelma. Thelma, in turn, becomes the catalytic, proactive, and tough cookie, robbing a convenience store in order to continue their journey. Thelma tells Louise,

Something's like crossed over in me and I can't go backI feel awake...wide awake. I don't remember ever feelin' this awake. Everything looks different. You feel like that too? Like you got something to look forward to?

The emotional journey of these two women becomes parallel from this point forward; they seem to merge into a single energy with a shared purpose—to remain free at all costs.

Effective buddy films may have more or less balance between the focus of the two leads. But it is imperative that both characters are connected through motivation, objective, and clear transformational arcs that run parallel to one another or which trade places with each other.

The Character Diatribe

How do you build multi-faceted and believable characters? One of the best pieces of advice made on this subject was by the late, great Steve Tesich, the award-winning screenwriter of BREAKING AWAY and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. Tesich described his story development process as one in which he began by writing interior monologues or character diatribes for an imagined or real individual. These diatribes would articulate those all-important attitudes or positions that characters feel towards their given circumstances, towards other characters, or towards themselves. Think of the character diatribe as the internal rumblings of a person, such as those talks we might have with ourselves when we’re trying to sort out a problem, or the rants that we have in our heads that we never quite bring ourselves to say to someone’s face. The writing of character diatribes should be a process of free writing—not in screenplay format, necessarily, but more akin to journal writing or talking to oneself. It is a way of tapping those deeper, hidden motivations for a character’s eventual objectives and actions, putting one’s self in the shoes of another person and imagining how that individual would feel about things.

Once a protagonist’s motivations begin to emanate from this process, do the same for your possible supporting characters. Soon you will discover that conflicts are emerging between the points of view of one diatribe vs. another. These will become the basis for the dramatic action of your screenplay. You may find that writing character diatribes will also create dialogue and monologue language that you can use later in your script. The most memorable dialogue often stems from the rants, rationalizations, or realizations of a character’s emotional diatribe or inner monologue.

See if you can recognize the films from which these choice pieces of dialogue come. Then analyze for yourself the set of given circumstances, motivations, and objectives that gave rise to the interior passion or emotional state of the character that said it.

Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important!

Relationship Web

A good movie is made up of a web of relationships between characters, and it is important that the screenwriter fully develop that complex network of connections without leaving any strings unattached. It often helps to draw a visual expression of character relationships, like an organizational chart or extended family tree, in order to see which relationships or connections you have left out or have made confusing or incomplete.

Start by putting the important relationships in a square or circle in the center, and then create satellites out from those central characters. Try to account for all of the speaking characters (and any important characters that are mentioned but never seen). Indicate important or minor connections between characters with different kinds of lines or colors that illustrate the quality of the relationship. Draw arrows at the end of lines to indicate the direction of influence between characters.

To view an example of a Relationship Web (for the network of relationships in the movie THELMA AND LOUISE) go to your COURSE DOCUMENTS on the Blackboard menu, and select "RELATIONSIP WEB". This example can help you figure out how to create your own relationship web for your story.

Review Questions

Click on the Assignments button on the left and then the Lesson 7 Take quiz link to answer the review questions.

Graded Assignments

1. What do the characters in MEAN STREETS say about themselves and each other? How do they respond to each other? Write your answers in a profile list for each character, noting how character traits can be revealed through dialogue and actions rather than through lengthy scene descriptions that describe their qualities and characteristics. Submit your profile lists by e-mail to your course instructor.

2. How do you think some of the dialogue scenes in MEAN STREETS were created? Do you think they were improvised or scripted? How much characterization was developed by the actor, and how much by the writer/director? Write your opinion in a 500-600 word essay, using specific examples from the film. E-mail your essay to your instructor.

3. Do you have clear characters in your story? Define each character in terms of his or her purpose. Refer to your textbook for a review of archetypes if necessary. Make a list indicating the principal and supporting characters in your storyline, the purpose each fulfills, and provide examples of how their specific actions or transformations fulfill that purpose. E-mail your list to your instructor.

4. Write a character diatribe for your protagonist or antagonist and e-mail it to your instructor.