P141
The Protagonist must be empathetic(代入感);he may or may not be sympathetic.
Sympathetic means likable , Tom Hanks is likable, the moment they step onscreen, we like them. We’d want them as friends, family members, or lovers. Then have an innate likability and evoke sympathy.Empathy is more profound response.
Empathetic means “like me”. The unconscious logic of the audience runs like this:“This character is like me. Therefore, I want him to have whatever it is he wants, because if I were he in those circumstances, I’d want the same thing for myself.”Hollywood has many synonymic expressions for the connection:“somebody to get behind,”“someone to root for.” All describe the empathetic connection that the audience strikes between itself and the protagonist. An audience strikes between itself and the protagonist. An audience may, if so moved, empathize with every character in your story, but it must empathize with your protagonist. If not, the audience/story bond is broken.
Empathy is absolute, while sympathy is optional. The audience identifies with deep character, with innate qualities revealed through choice under pressure.
P144 Unexpected
In story, we concentrate on that moment, and only that moment, in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism. The world of the character reacts differently than expected, more powerfully than expected, or both.
I picked up the phone, call Jack, and say:“sorry to bother you, but I can’t find Dolores’s phone number. Could you---” and he shouts :“Dolores? Dolores! How dare you ask me for her number?” and slams down the phone, Suddenly, life is interesting.
P178 Fine writing emphasizes Reactions(surprising reaction)
P181 A story is a design in five parts: The inciting incident, Progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution.
Setting is defined in terms of period, duration, location and level of conflict.
P182 Whenever human beings gather to do anything, there’s always an uneven distribution of power.
Love relationships are political ,An old Gypsy expression goes “ He who confesses first loses.” The one be loved controls the relationship.
P186 Authenticity has nothing to do with so-called reality. A story set in a world tha could never exist could be absolutely authentic. Story arts do not distinguish between reity and the various nonrealities of fantasy, dream, and ideality. The creative intelligence of the writer merges all these into unique yet convincing fictional reality.
P188 Believability is the key to terror.
The inciting incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.
P196 For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his object of desire against forces of antagonism(inner, personal, extra-personal),He may or may not achieve it. This is story in a nutshell.
P243 As audience, we experience an emotion when the telling takes us through a transition of values. First, we must empathize with the character. Second, we must know what the character wants and want the character to have it. Third, we must understand the values at stake in the character’s life. Within these conditions, a change in values moves our emotions.
P244 Story must create these dynamic alternations between positive and negative emotion in order to obey the law of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns , true in life as well as in story is this : The more often we experience something, the less effect it has.
The law of diminishing returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
P246 In film, feeling is known as mood, Mood is created in the film’s text: the quality of light and color, tempo of action and editing, casting, style of dialogue, production design, and musical score. The sum of all these textural qualities creates a particular mood. In general,mood, like setups, is a form of foreshadowing, a way of preparing or shaping the audience’s anticipations. Moment by moment, however, while the dynamic of the scene determines whether the emotion it causes is positive or negative, the mood makes this emotion specific.
P252
Subtext is the life under the surface--thoughts and feelings both known and unknown, hidden by behavior.
Nothing is what it seems, This principle calls for the screenwriter’s constant awareness of the duplicity of life, his recognition that everything exists on at least two levels, and that, therefore, he must write a simultaneous duality: First, he must create a verbal description of the sensory surface of life, sight and sound, activity and talk. Second, he must create the inner world of conscious and unconscious desire, action and reaction, impulse and id, genetic and experiential imperatives. As in reality, so in fiction: He must veil the truth with a living mask, the actual thoughts and feelings of characters behind their saying and doing.
As old Hollywood expression goes:”If he scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit.”
Actors are created with material form the subtext, not the text. An actor brings a character to life from the inside out, from unspoken, even unconscious thoughts and feelings out to a surface of behavior. If there is no inner life, no subtext, it is unactable because there’s nothing to act.
Something is happening because it’s in the unspoken thoughts and emotions of the actors. As we see through the surface, we’ll lean back with a knowing smile:“Look what happened.They are not just changing the tire on a car. He thinks she is hot and she knows it. Boy has met girl.”
P255 We never fully express the truth, for in fact, we rarely know it.
P257
The Technique of scene analysis
1. Define conflict
2. Note opening value: positive or negative
3. Break the scene into beats: the exchange of action and reaction is a beat. As long as it continues, Character A is “Groveling at her feet”But Character B is “Ignoring the plea,”it’s one beat, even if their exchange repeats a number of times, it’s still one and the same beat. A new beat doesn’t occur until behavior clearly changes.
4. Note closing value and compare with opening value
Compare this note to the one made in step two, if the two notation are the same, the activity between them is a nonevent. Nothing has changed,therefore nothing has happened.The scene is flat.
5. Survey beats and locate turning point
P266
These two people have a relationship. Each feels like the injured party, and each knows the sensitivity of the other so well that they hurt each other with ease.
P270 《Casablanca》Analyze 5
1.Approaching her/ignoring him
2.Protecting her/rejecting him
3.Apologizing/rejecting him
4.Excuse making/rejecting him
5.Getting his foot in the door/opening the door
6.Getting down on his knees/asking for more
7.Guilt-tripping her/guilt-tripping him
8.Saying Goodbye/Refusing to react
9.Calling her a coward/Calling him a fool
10.Sexually propositioning her/hiding her reaction
11.Calling her a slut/destroying his hope
P289 Pacing
On one hand, we desire serenity,harmony, peace, and relaxation,but too much of this day after day and we become bored to the point of ennui and need therapy.As a result, we also desire challenge, tension, danger, even fear. So the rhythm of life swings between these poles.
P291 It is just like sex. Masters of the bedroom arts pace their lovemaking. They begin by taking each other to a state of delicious tension short of--and we use the same word in both cases--climax, then tell a joke and shift positions before building each other to an even higher tension short of climax, then have a sandwich, watch TV. And gather energy to hen reach greater and greater intensity, making love in cycles of rising tension until they finally climax simultaneously and the earth moves and they see colors. The gracious storyteller makes love to us. He knows we are capable of a tremendous release。。。。If he paces us to it.
A typical two-hour feature plays forty to sixty scenes.
P296 Symbolic ascension
Like images in our dreams, it invades the unconscious mind and touches us deeply--as long as we’re unaware of its presence. If, in a heavy-handed way, we label images as “symbolic”, their effect is destroyed. But if they are slipped quietly, gradually, and unassumingly into the telling they move us profoundly.
P310 William Goldman argues that the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects.
People think happiness means never suffering, so they never feel anything deeply.
What the audience wants is emotional satisfaction.
The ending must be both inevitable and unexpected.
P317 we never do more than we have to, expend any energy we don’t have to, take any risks we don’t have to, change if we don’t have to.why should we?
P320 A story that progresses to the limit of human experience in depth and breadth of conflict must move through a pattern that includes the contrary, the contradictory,and the negation of the negation.(否定之否)
P323 Many parents hate their children, many children hate their parents, and they fight and scream and say it. In other fine films, although a parent bitterly resents and secretly hates his or her child, they pretend to love him, when the antagonist adds that lie, the story moves to negation of the negation.how can a child defend himself against that?
In Wall Street Gekko feels impoverished because no amount of money is enough。 A billionaire, he acts as if he were a starving thief, grasping for money at any illegal opportunity.
If a story doe not reach the negation of the negation, it may strike the audience as satisfying--but never brilliant, never sublime.