For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from August 2009:
* One of the most interesting articles I stumbled upon this year is this one from The Guardian: “Making a Drama” by David Edgar. It covers a lot of territory and I had intended to parse my way through it, but didn’t. Here’s one excerpt to give you a taste:
The idea that characters are an embodiment of forces that are present in a number of stories was explored in more detail by Vladimir Propp, whose 1928 Morphology of the Folktale sought to analyse the plots of more than 100 Russian folktales. He concluded that, while the names and attributes of characters varied wildly from story to story, neither their actions nor their functions changed. For example, the person from whom the hero receives the magic weapon with which he will defeat the villain could be an old woman, a witch, a group of knights, a robber, an animal or even a river or a tree. In the Hindu epic The Ramayana it’s a wise man who gives Rama a magic arrow; in the James Bond movies it’s Q, the gadget demonstrator. In CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the magic weapons with which the children will defeat the White Witch are distributed by Father Christmas from his sleigh. From this, Propp argues that the important thing about a person in a story is not their characteristics or personality, but their narrative function.
While I wouldn’t go as far as Propp – because clearly a character’s “characteristics or personality” are important – one of the core principles of what I teach about character archetypes is this: “Character = Function.” And in majority of movies, there are five primary narrative functions provided by situations, objects, and most often characters: Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster.
* On August 4, 2009, screenwriting ‘guru’ Blake Snyder died. We honored Blake here and here. I also found this interview Blake gave. FYI, his website continues on in his absence: blakesnyder.com.
* You knew it had to happen: Twitterature.
* Finally If found another interview with screenwriter Diablo Cody here. Interesting to see the key image she had in mind when she wrote Juno:
The movie Juno makes some powerful suggestions regarding pregnancy and against abortion. What you’re take?
DC: I had one image in my mind when I wrote this. That was of Juno sitting across from Mark and Vanessa Loring being polar opposites to her, and then having to audition to adopt her baby. To me, that was the movie right there. It was a weird image, and I couldn’t have gotten that if she had an abortion. She had to have the baby in order for me to execute the story.
It’s hard, Jason and I wanted to make the movie as personal as we could rather than political. Juno never moralizes about the choice she makes. We never get a speech like, “I can’t kill my baby.” I’m pro-choice, so for me it was very important that the movie not seem to have any kind of anti-choice agenda. Um, but when she’s in the abortion clinic, I think of myself as a teenager. I was kinda this anxious, phobic little kid, and I was afraid to have blood drawn. I would have freaked out if I was about to get an abortion!
So she bolts out of fear. It’s a personal choice not moral, I don’t think. At the end, everything turns out alright, and then people say, “This is a candy-coated vision of reality.” You know what, I had a friend who had a baby when she was a teenager, and everything turned out alright. It happens. And it’s not always a tragedy. And I think women are being punished all the time for making so-called mistakes. I’m not going to punish my character.
Tomorrow we’re on to September!
