crash course

The Academy Awards are drawing ever near, and as Hollywood prepares for its big night of self-congratulatory excess, award speculation is reaching its usual brain-fevered pitch. Every year, it seems, one dark-horse nominee comes out of nowhere to challenge the odds-on favorite. This year is no different. Despite the near-universal critical acclaim lavished on Brokeback Mountain, for the past few weeks the buzz has been building steadily behind another Best Picture contender: Crash.

As legend has it, Paul Haggis outlined the entire script for Crash in a single late-night pan-flash of inspiration. Now, is he just a mad genius? It's possible. Canadians often are.

However, I have to wonder: could it be that as Paul Haggis toiled away on such televisual touchstones as thirtysomething, L.A. Law, and Due South, he was able to develop a sort of writerly technique - a formula, if you will - that allowed him to finesse an award-winning screenplay in a mere matter of hours?

I decided to find out.

I spent an evening in quiet contemplation of the complex, challenging, and - above all - artistically credible cinematic two-step that is Crash. I considered the characters, the pacing, and the plot and I tried to reconstruct the process that would allow a person to script the better part of a potential Best Picture in a single night.

Of course, I had to do this all in my head. The DVD is, like, 12 bucks or something.

Then, while taking the subway to work this morning, I decided to plot my own provocative ensemble drama. And you know what? I discovered that Paul Haggis might just be on to something. There is a process.

This is what I learned.

Okay, so, the first thing you need to do in any complex, challenging, and credible artistic process is select your issue. Be sure to pick an issue that is provocative. This means that you will be able to include graphic depictions of sex or violence without sacrificing your aforementioned artistic credibility. Sure, it's not the good kind of sex or violence, but people will pay attention all the same.

Try not to choose anything that's been too recently media-frenzied - you don't want to write a screenplay on a subject only to find out that Law & Order beat you to it.

Here are some suggestions:

Suburban Ennui
Campaign Finance Reform
SARS
Genocide

For the purpose of this exercise, my issue of choice - for obvious reasons - is "meth mouth".

Moving along: we also need to choose our character names. This might seem daunting at first, but you can actually find these names almost anywhere. You could use family names or names of friends or names from a favorite book. You could even go on the Internet, where I'm sure you can find all sorts of helpful information. Paul Haggis probably came up with his names all on his own, but remember: he's a trained professional.

I got my names from this week's issue of The Economist.

Now, we're going to be making an ensemble drama. This means that we will be able to explore the complexities of human interaction and will be eligible for the maximum number of SAG awards. Lucky for us, the more characters you have, the less character they need. So character development's going to be a piece of cake. All we have to do is take our chosen names and assign each one an occupation and an emotional state.

Let's also include the roughly opposite emotional state, as this will come in handy later on.

Jacques: Firefighter, Scared/Fearless
Vladimir: Astronaut, Immature/Mature
Hugo: Dentist, Angry/Not Angry
Kim: Pastry Chef, Malnourished/Corpulent
Blair: Nun, Conflicted/Ecstatic
Mikulas: Writer, Self-absorbed/Selfless

(Important! You should always write yourself into the story. If you don't understand why this is necessary, then you have no business being a writer. In this exercise, Mikulas is going to act as my simulacrum. I realize that this might seem unnecessarily complicated - because, well, I'm a girl and he's a boy - but it's subtlety like this that really appeals to the Academy electorate.)

Next, we have to figure out how these characters relate to one another. The key to a successful ensemble drama, I have discovered, is convoluted interrelationality. Remember that complicated and implausible are often excellent proxies for complex and challenging, so we need to be sure that all of our characters know each other, even if they run in very different circles in a very big city. Don't forget that even if you create a scenario that would never, ever happen in real life, you can always film it in ambient light or on digital video.

This is called "realism."

In order to weave an effectively complex and challenging web of interrelationality, I recommend the use of a visual aid:

I'm fairly certain that they used something quite similar for Love, Actually.

Okay, so the trick here is to give adjacent characters a pre-existing relationship and diametrically opposed characters an onscreen confrontation. The pre-existing relationships give the story depth; the onscreen conflict gives the story momentum. Both of these are essential to Academy Award-winning storytelling.

Observe:

In this example, Kim and Hugo are married. (Since their emotional states are malnourished and angry, respectively, we know that this marriage is not a happy one.) Let's say that Jacques and Hugo are friends from high school. And that Jacques knew Vladimir from his days in the space program. (Recall that Jacques is scared. This must be why he had to drop out of NASA.) And Vladimir is the younger brother of Blair who once taught elementary Latin to Mikulas who is Kim's gay best friend.

See how well this is all coming together? Already we have what the critics like to call "layers".

Now, Blair and Hugo meet when Blair goes to him with a toothache. Turns out a toothache is the least of her problems. Meanwhile, across town, Mikulas has built himself a meth lab to support his writing habit. He knew that synthesizing phenylacetone and methylamine was a recipe for a really killer high, but he never thought it might also be a formula for despair. (Or, as Jacques is about to discover, that it might also be incredibly explosive.) And as for Vladimir, he just wanted a cupcake from Kim's pastry shop. Little did he know how his life was about to change.

And there you go. All that remains now is a little third-act resolution. We don't have to worry about resolving the actual conflict, as resolution is neither complex nor challenging nor artistically credible. This is why French film is so often well-received. We do, however, need to worry about satisfying the audience, so we'll trick them into a sense of resolution by relying on our old storytelling friend, the character arc.

What is a character arc, you ask? Simple: a character arc is the path any given character takes along the way from their initial emotional state to that state's rough opposite. (See, I told you our earlier antonymical work would come in handy.) However, in the strict Euclidean world of ensemble drama, character growth is not so much an arc as it is a line: that is, the shortest distance between two emotional points. We have limited screen time here, remember, so efficiency is key.

I'm thinking that Mikulas (selflessly) pulls Jacques from a burning building after Jacques (fearlessly) breaks a leg in a daring meth-lab rescue attempt. Vlad (seriously) breaks down without his buttercream frosting while (corpulent) Kim struggles with rehab. And Blair dies in Hugo's (not-angry) arms - but not before she (ecstatically) sees the face of God.

Of course, in order to achieve maximal dramatic effect, we will want to cross-cut from scene to scene to scene, all in a seamless way that further proves the point that there is a common thread in all of us regardless of our preconceived editorial notions.

But we can take care of that in post.

And there we have it: complex, challenging, credible. It's a snappy logline away from a handshake deal with Fox Searchlight. I don't even have a particularly long commute. With a little more time, I bet I could make this story even more powerful. Particularly if I introduced a sweet-faced child - and then put that child in mortal peril.

In light of this exercise, I have to admit: I am totally rethinking my stance on this movie. A few days ago, I was infuriated at the possibility that Crash would manage to beat out both the critical favorite and my own personal favorite for Best Picture. I told myself that I should know that the Academy is no better at making an informed decision than the rest of the American public, that it should come as no surprise.

For the first time, though, I am heartened by and perhaps even in accord with the Academy's reckless bad taste. Because even though Crash doesn't really manage to say anything new or particularly interesting about racism, it does manage to give hope to the most hopeless among us:

Struggling screenwriters.

And for that alone, the man deserves a Thalberg. (More)