You Ought to be in Movies; You Also Ought to Write, Direct and Produce Them
August 2, 2002
Ever wonder why nobody wants to watch your home movies? Ever wonder why some "real" movies are so spellbinding you can't leave your seat even for some popcorn?
Maybe yours are boring because they don't tell a story. Maybe the Hollywood blockbusters are riveting because they do.
Producer-director-writer Andrew Lane believes the story is everything in making films and videos. Lane, who has made 18 full-length features for television, including "The Secretary," "Trade Off," "Desperate Motive" and "Lonely Hearts," teaches a summer film class at the University of Richmond for ordinary people who want to improve their film and video skills.
Aristotle had it right, Lane believes, when he said plays had to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. Movies are no different, he says. They must have a hero or protagonist. They must have conflict, movement and change. And they must have resolution.
Good movies all pass what Charles Deemer, author of "Screenwright: The Craft of Screenwriting," calls the "popcorn test." They hook you right from the start so that if you forgot to buy popcorn before you sat down, you would choose to go hungry.
Take Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The scary opening scene is set in the dense underbrush of a South American rainforest where Indiana Jones and his traitorous compatriots happen upon a hideous stone statue and a fellow explorer impaled by a booby trap. Jones must overcome poisonous darts, a crumbling sanctuary, a giant boulder rumbling toward him and a boa constrictor onboard his airplane. You get the idea. There's no way you'll leave to get popcorn.
Act I, then, introduces the hero and establishes his character. It also sets the stage for Act II, Jones's quest for the Ark of the Covenant, and his conflict with a fiendish French archaeologist backed by the Nazis. Act III brings resolution to the quest: the hero's overcoming enormous odds and his vindication.
Lane is not saying you should become another Spielberg, but we all could make better movies if we showed a little imagination. Even if you're a world traveler who films spectacular natural settings and man-made structures, you'll get a yawn if you don't tell a story. Nobody likes looking only at scenery or people making faces. Create a story with three acts and film it. Have some fun. Don't just point and shoot.
"Recent digital technology has put filmmaking in everyone's hands," Lane says, noting the heroine of the recent film "Legally Blond" makes a jaw-dropping "personal profile video" that gets her into Harvard Law.
Lane says he wants to make his students "aware of their own lives." He wants them to make their "personal beliefs relevant to their story telling." He also teaches them major film storytelling techniques, such as composition, mood, timing, screen direction, extending and condensing time and editing.
A really good book to get you thinking about story ideas for your own movies, Lane says, is Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."
"It's one of the fundamental books, all about archetypes. George Lucas studied it before composing 'Star Wars.'" And if you're really serious about film making yourself, Lane advises persistence and belief in yourself. "Art is a good deal of rejection."