5 Great lessons from Craig Mazin’s “How to Write a Movie”

Take a second to search for screenplay structures on your search engine and head over to images. You’re going to be covered in pictures of graphs, lines, and pinpoints for specific things that must happen at specific times in order for your story to work. Now, these seem fashionable to pin or post or save or print out, but today’s blog asks the question, have these helped your career at all?

For those who don’t know Craig Mazin, he won an Emmy last year for writing “Chernobyl.” I know his work from back in the long-ago days of the 1990s for writing Rocketman (which I saw at the Scottsdale 6 Drive-in MAY IT REST IN PEACE) and superguiltynotsorryforlovingthismovie Scary Movie 3.

On an older episode of ScriptNotes sans John August, Craig Mazin talked about his view on how to write a movie and I gotta tell you, it was an amazing speech. I’m going to encourage you to listen to the entire thing, but here’s a few sweet takeaways that I took away from the roughly 45-minute podcast:

1. “Structure Structure Structure…It’s a total trap!”
   • “Structure isn’t the dog, it’s the tail. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic element.”

TRUTH. What are all these templates and graphs and shapes for anyway when it comes to plotting your story? Do they give you anything more than what a bot, forced to read a thousand hallmark scripts and spit out what they think a good movie would be?

https://twitter.com/keatonpatti/status/1072877290902745089?lang=en

Please laugh as I did.

I think we can all agree that a great story is more than just the sum of its parts. In my mind, if the screenplay is the blueprint of the finished product, structure could be the blueprint OF the blueprint. Even people who don’t care about the inner workings of a movie know when it’s about to be “the sad part.” Yes great movies have twists and turns and cool folks not looking at explosions, but you know what?

It’s not about the explosion: it’s about the person NOT LOOKING AT IT.

Right got it. A story should be about a character who wants something and is having a hard time getting it. And a really really cool car

Let’s move on.

2. What is a scene, really?

• • “Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene, there’s a new truth at the end of that scene and you begin again.”

This is pretty basic advice, but too often I read/see scenes where there’s no change, no forward progress, no movement, etc. This isn’t just a beginner issue, but something I see at the professional level, or at the very least, the ‘dumped on Redbox’ level.

The old advice of ‘get in as late as possible, leave as early as possible’ is something you should have stapled above your writing desk along with about a thousand other snippets of advice, but more on that in other posts.

Craig talks more about the story (defined as a change of state) and the three basic ways your story changes: Internal change (the emotions of the character), interpersonal change (main relationship of the story), and external change (narrative, plot, etc). Within these are the scenes, where things start one way and change by the end. Take one of those three changes and fire at least one of them during a scene to move things along and that’s a story, right? At the most basic of levels, I’d say yes!

3. A fundamental misunderstanding of theme.
   • “Theme is your central dramatic argument…The argument must be an argument.”

There must be a question worth answering, not a concept. Craig uses the theme of “Brotherhood” as an example.
What is the movie about? Brotherhood…
That’s not an argument. Hell, that’s not even really a theme. I had to pause here, because I feel like Craig and I took the same general.
A few years ago a friend told me that the person I was taking a general meeting with really loves it when there’s brothers are in the movie.
“Like, just that there’s two characters who are brothers?”
“Nah man. Brotherhood as the theme.”

I kid you not.

Was it good advice at the time? I suppose? But still, it’s not a theme!  Something like “Can women and men be friends?” IS an argument.

So what argument are you making in your story? I’m wrestling with one at the moment in the book I’m writing: “Leaders are born, not made.” I think that’s a great argument because there are two sides to that thought. Think about your story. What is the argument?

4. What is the purpose of a story?

1. • “…is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.”

I don’t want to pick on any one specific genre or studio here (mostly because they have ALL been guilty of this), but I’ve seen movies where the only purpose of the movie was to get you to think/feel/act how the creator’s of the story wanted you to. Religious movies, political movies, and academy award-nominated movies are all guilty of the ‘If you have a message, call Western Union’ quote.

In these types of movies, they put the characters through the most minor of obstacles and their transformation is factory spewed at best. There’s a famous playwright named George Abbott who once said that “In the first act, get your hero up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him, and in the third act, get him down safely.” Real stories, real movies (the good ones anyway) don’t throw pebbles. They fu**ing throw stones that gradually become bigger and bigger. See a clip from my favorite cartoon of all time, Darkwing Duck:

Now THAT’S how you really test a dang character. Craig dives into the guts and glory of why Finding Nemo is amazing and how all of Marlin’s scenes are tests against his central beliefs.

5. Embrace the Coward
6. • “Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.”

I loved this section of the talk. The pieces of the ‘stop thinking about structure’ puzzle really start to come together here when we realize that the first half of the movie is really all about challenging the character and not just about hitting incidents beats or making things inconvenient.

I’m going into dangerous territory here because the temptation is to now plugin this talk and turn it into a structure pentagram, but there’s still so much room to play here. The important takeaway is that your story is about challenging your character’s belief system. So in Empire Strikes Back, Luke is constantly being challenged with his belief system about what the force is. In the Matrix, it’s Neo’s belief in himself. In Indiana Jones, it’s his belief system about what the ark is. There’s a ton of different ways to do this, so how are you going to apply it?

There’s a lot more here than I first anticipated and I might dissect it more in another post, but I hope this helped you as it has helped me to view story in a different way.

SOME QUICK BUSINESS:

If this was helpful, give it a heart on Instagram and give me a subscribe on youtube where I’ll be posting more content in the new year! If you’ll permit me one more plug? I started a podcast called Cinema Gush with my good friend Brendon where we gush about our favorite movies. Give it a like on Facebook if you’re on there!

Thanks for reading. I hope this helped you out!

~Nic