The definition of plot is character in action. Character is the flesh and blood of every screenplay. Without well-defined characters you have no chance of getting your movie made.

You may wonder, considering many of the flimsy films that have been brought to the screen, how do they get there? The truth is, many screenplays bought by studios are quite good in their original form. In the process of getting a movie made a lot of character is washed out. Among the producers, directors, and market researchers, the good stuff is often replaced with homogenized product. This is the failure of art by committee. Moviemaking is also a very conservative business that takes a few directions and relies more on financial performance than artistic integrity when deciding which movies to make.

This should not dissuade you from creating the very best characters you can. Many films work because the writer’s original vision and characters are so strong that even those producers and directors cannot ruin it. Most Hollywood filmmakers know a good idea when they see it or read it. What happens once the idea goes into development is another story.

So once you know what the story is about, then you have to concentrate on who it’s about. Four types of characters populate movies: The Hero or Heroine, The Villain, The Buddy and the Romantic Interest.

The Hero or Heroine

Stories belong to heroes and heroines. They appear on almost every page of a screenplay. The camera focuses on them. They are on screen ninety percent of the time. The pacing of the movie depends upon the emotional and/ or physical roller coaster you send them on. We as audience members depend on their rise and fall, and rise again, for our entertainment. It’s why we go to movies. We want to feel vicariously what these characters experience.  Could we ever hope to survive what Scarlet O’Hara went through, or Lawrence of Arabia? The hero or heroine is who your story hinges upon.

Consider these guidelines.

1-Never make your main character too good u0 front because you’ll have no place to go from there but down.

Don’t make your main character too heroic or too wonderful in the beginning. You need a human being with vulnerabilities and problems. Give your character common dilemmas that we can identify with because no one can identify with perfection.

Some characters are just awful people on the surface, but we still care about them. Look at Brando’s character in Godfather 11. The protagonist is a mafia Don who sacrifices his wife and children to power. His is a case study of a diabolical, evil character, and yet, we’re fascinated by him.

In the Scent of a Women, Al Pacino plays a drunken, self loathing blind colonel who is so bitter that he tries to destroy everyone around him before attempting to take his own life. For some this character is irredeemable. The writers took him so far out of our zone of sympathy that nothing could bring him back. I waited for the Pacino character to make a comeback and felt that the writers succeeded in locating within their character the potential for grace, if he stopped drinking.

Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, is an intellectual know-it-all. In the beginning you can’t stand this officious snob. Through his relationship with Eliza Doolittle, he finds some humility. He faces up to his problems. He climbs down from his pedestal and finally becomes a human being.

The Laura Dern character, Rose, in Rambling Rose is saucy, flamboyant, troubled, emotionally needy, confused-character complexity at its very best. In creating this character, Calder Willingham was not afraid to mix it up. He struggled to discover what made his character tick. You must do the same.

2- Pay attention to cause and effect.

Character should be the cause of everything and plot should be the effect, rather than the other way around.  If you allow plot rather than character to drive your story, you end up with a series of boring moments that don’t involve the audience. Characters should be in charge.  They are the engines running the story. You, as the writer, serve the story.  “Characters have their own lives and their own logic,” says Isaac Bashevis Singer, “and you [the writer] have to act accordingly.”

            The difference between a live screenplay and a dead one is that in the live one the characters take control. In the dead one, the writer depends upon plot to move the story forward because he cannot bear to relinquish his throne to his characters.  In these ego-driven cases, the writer asks how he, the writer, would react to each situation, and not how his characters would.

 

3- Don’t forget punks, deadbeats and the common man

Look at Peter Falk’s character in Columbo, a schlemiel in a trench coat who can’t do anything right.  Underneath it all, however, he’s a canny, wily police lieutenant with a first-class brain.  Notice that the writers always pit Columbo against suave, sophisticated, wealthy, driven women and men, outwardly successful, but inwardly unkempt and gnarly.  The opposite of Columbo. Do you have elements in your story that suggest this kind of approach?  What creature lies beneath the clothes?

 

4- Remember that your main character always wants something and will do anything to get it.

The main character’s drive becomes the spine of the story.  Two questions to ask yourself constantly:

            What does my character want?

            What will my character risk to get it?

            Al Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon wants a sex change for his boyfriend.  To get the money, he decides to rob a bank on a sunny Brooklyn afternoon.  He’s willing to break the law, even kill, for love.  How much gumption does your character have, to what lengths will he go to get what he wants?  That’s your story.

 

5- Give your character a ruling passion.

A feverish dedication, a compulsion, a fear, a terror, an issue that drives him and has prevented him from getting just about everything he’s ever wanted.  You’ve chosen this story, at this moment, for your main character to shed the thing that keeps him down.  It’s not going to be easy for him and that’s why it’s the most critical time in his life.

            In Taxi Driver, ex-Vietnam Marine Travis Bickle is a mess of gnarly obsessions.  He obsesses over women he can’t have and, even more, the men who can, and do, have them.  The movie takes place inside his nightmarish head as we look at the world through his anger. It is in this story that he reaches his breaking point. 

            In In The Line of Fire, the Clint Eastwood character has his burden, a 30-year-old wound inflicted on the day he failed to save President John F. Kennedy from a sniper’s bullet.  The present-day sniper, played by John Malkovich, has come to haunt him. Clint is much older, physically and emotionally, then he was thirty years ago. He wonders if he’ll be able to meet the challenge. Facing the demons of his past, and a malevolent enemy in the present, he knows he must. He marches forward, reaching inside for courage and stamina that might not even be there anymore. This is the way it’s done well. 

 

6- A Character with a tragic flaw has to face up to it by the end.

A main character is transformed when he stands up to a crucial problem. In order to reach his full potential, your character had to resolve not only his external problems but also the fears and intolerance that have botched up his life. He reaches a point of revelation when he understands his problem and knows he must do something about it.

You have two conflicts for your main character to face: Getting to the Point of Revelation and The Action of Resolution. Both are difficult, painful journeys.

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy suffers from confused liberalism. He says, “Oh, I think black people are wonderful. I talk to them every day. They’re fabulous, just like you and me.” Then his daughter brings a black man to dinner, and suddenly Spencer Tracy has to face up to the truth of his intolerance.

In Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight is a Texas boy who arrives in Manhattan with spangles and jangles, and the intention of seducing New York City women out of their money.  He doesn’t make a cent.  The women laugh at him, call him a fool. He’s a walking joystick in a ten-gallon hat. He has spent twenty years building an image, and it two days it self-destructs. Everything comes into question for him, especially his sexuality. Things happen. He reacts by engaging in a homosexual relationship. He gets beat up. He ends up on the street. He hits bottom. Once there, stripped of all artifice, he opens his eyes and the light begins to shine. He finds something he doesn’t expect at all-friendship. And, he finds it with a very unlikely character, Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman. Midnight Cowboy is the painful story of a man who, through a series of shocking events, begins to unravel. All of the protective roles he has wrapped himself in-stud, lover, seducer-peel away. When the objects of his obsession, women, laugh at him, he becomes undone.

In The Apartment, a reluctant bachelor played by Jack Lemmon gets caught up in his boss’ love trysts, and as a result falls in love. Even though he knows better, he’s undeniably swept away by love for the boss’ girl, played by Shirley MacLaine. The movie is about shedding fears and insecurities and accepting something that’s right-and right in front of him-no matter how much he resists it.

 

7-Remember that a hero’s/heroine’s imperfections make him or her human.

A wonderful example of this is the classic character of Cyrano DeBergerac. He has one imperfection, and it is this imperfection that sabotages his chance for the one thing he desperately wants-love.

            Cyrano has a nose, a gargantuan schnoz, and he is so ashamed of it that he hides behind other men’s looks while offering his love to women.

            Cyrano doesn’t give women too much credit. He thinks they are more concerned with surface than substance. When in actuality, it’s he, Cyrano, who’s strapped by the notion. Until he realizes, through the lovely Rosalind, that it is not the nose but its owner that makes the man.  Steve Martin in Roxanne, a contemporary adaptation of this story, made his ‘Cyrano’ an engaging and very human character. Your characters must face up to their demons, which they’ve been carrying around for a long time.

In his early movies, for instance, Woody Allen’s problem was never getting the girl. Never. This was his trademark-the poor intellectual schlep who’s alone in the end.

At the time he was writing Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, my personal favorite of his films, came out to rave reviews. Woody Allen received such phenomenal notices for Purple Rose that he became insecure. He had written and directed the picture, but not acted in it. So what did he do? He quickly wrote himself into Hannah. Until that time the movie had no role for Woody. So, into the script comes his old standard, the Jewish neurotic upon whom Woody Allen made his reputation

Even more shocking in that movie is that in the end, Woody Allen gets the girl! Here’s in an example of not only the character getting what he wants, but also the writer. 

 

8-Watch out for clichés

Writers, I among them, often see someone familiar coming their way-the dumb blonde, the mousy librarian, the still anal-retentive accountant- and feel a certain safety in this familiarity. False security! A cliché offers no safety. It points to laziness and lack of imagination. If you’ve seen it before, it’s a cliché. Don’t use it. Strike out for something original. Recognize these hackneyed images, phrases, or characters for what they are. 

Chris Keane has written many books, originals and adaptations of others' books and his own into movies and TV series. Among his books are three on screenwriting. His latest - ROMANCING THE A-LIST: Writing the Script the Big Stars Want to Make - was published in April 2008.

 

Chris is script doctor. See his website at KEANEWORDS.com