Show, Don't Tell - Unless You Have To

 Static scenes. Ugh - the big “tell” that indicates to any producer that you are a rank amateur. What causes them? How do you fix them? A few simple techniques can make all the difference.

 The preponderance of scenes that take place at a sit-down restaurant that I see in student scripts is amazing. The inexperienced writer rarely grasps that putting two people at a table and having them talk is probably the most static, unimaginative setting you can put on paper (unless you write it like the orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally”.)

 How to make those scenes less static using several techniques is simple.

 Resist the urge to use a talking head in anything - that’s really a television technique, not a great film technique. If you have to have a scene like that, and most times you can figure out a different way to go to get the information out, then put it in an elevator or something moving. Anything that moves is better than anything that doesn’t. They’re walking, they’re shopping, they’re picking up trash on a roadside as part of their court-enforced community service - anything else but sitting in one location works.

 If the restaurant is the only place you can do this then insert some event that causes the reader/audience to be slightly on edge. How about trying to catch a waiter’s attention - everyone knows how frustrating that is and it creates a level of suspense under the surface of the scene. Spill something on someone and have that character wait to blot it up. We all hate that the liquid is seeping into the clothing or tablecloth or whatever and will subconsciously urge the characters to do something about it thereby distracting us from the static nature of the moment.  

 Or - how about the last scenes in "The Sopranos?"  How suspenseful was that?  I was crawling the walls waiting to see what happened.  Imagine putting some necessary exposition into that context.  Wow.

Alternately, how about setting that restaurant scene in a park (picnic) or a standup roach coach or one of those walkup fast food stands where you can sit on a stool. It’s an eating/talking scene but it’s outside where you gain all the excitement and visual interest of the outdoors.

 Now I’m really not talking about suspenseful or action moments here. I’m talking about what I call “housekeeping scenes” - those moments when you really have no choice but to deliver on exposition - housekeeping.

 Like, for example, the moment in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where the Army people come to Indy looking for Ravenwood. Absolutely necessary and deadly static. To accomplish the scene, Lawrence Kasden, the writer, put four people in the scene to lower the narrative weight of one or two characters doing all the talking. Kasdan gets across a lot of historical and present-day information about Indy, the Ark, etc. in that scene by rotating who delivers the information and when. He takes that heavy-weight information and parcels it out between four characters in the room thereby reducing the narrative load that each character has and keeping the scene as visually interesting as possible. A simple but effective technique. He also had Indy draw on a blackboard and showed cool drawings from a ancient-looking Bible that helped deliver some of the information visually.

 The best delivery of dry exposition I’ve ever seen is from the first “Terminator.” The scene takes place just after the nightclub shootout where Sarah Connor has just witnessed Reese, the good guy, apparently shotgunning another man, the Terminator. She is then dragged to a police car by this apparent madman and they are then pursued by the Terminator and a slew of cops. While being shot at by the Terminator and all the cops, and having to hold onto Sarah because she wants to bolt out of this car and away from this maniac, Reese tells her (us) the entire backstory. She doesn’t believe him of course but we do because we’ve seen the entire story so far. Tons of exposition, easily digestible and excitingly delivered. Simply brilliant.

 Another really cool moment that I’ve never forgotten is from the movie “Truly, Madly, Deeply” called the thinking man’s “Ghost” written and directed by the late Anthony Minghella. In it, the main character, a woman meets a man late in the movie who she is romantically interested in. It is very late in the film and we need to know some things about him but the writer does not have the normal amount of scenes to bring us up to speed. What he does is masterful: the male character suggests that he and the female character hop while telling each other about themselves. It’s a beautiful distraction while we’re being given the necessary information.

 Another problem is that visual storytelling is really under-represented these days. Hitchcock said you should be able to turn the volume off and still be able to follow the story. I wrote a script once where the lead actor asked me to reduce his lines by about 30%. I cut out hundreds of lines of dialogue and didn’t miss one of them. A real lesson for me going forward - show it, don’t tell it. And when you absolutely need to tell it, remember that we’re working in a visual medium and write accordingly.

 Good luck. Be inspired. Do good work.