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Something I learned while watching Tarantino movies.

Cracker Funk

Cracker Funk

Just a random thought I felt like sharing.

This isn't exactly a revelation, but when I was watching "Inglorious Basterds" for the first time, it struck me that Tarantino doesn't necessarily make a 90-minute film, as he does make 6 15-minute shorts. Of course they're all related to each other to tell a larger overall story, but it's important that each short story is self-encapsulated, and can totally function on it's own.

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm just stating the obvious. That's not my main point. My main point is something I realized as I thought about it a little more. So, this multiple short-story structure is obvious with Tarantino movies because he labels them with chapter cards. But it's definitely not unique to him. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that SO MANY of my favorite movies have the exact same structure.

Yeah, the overall movie has it's three acts, but you could easily break the movie down into a number of shorter pieces, each of which has it's own three acts. Anyway, that's definitely something I plan to keep at the forefront of my mind, as I write my next feature.

Your thoughts? Am I just stating the obvious here? Any room for disagreement?
 
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PFSHH!! You just noticed that??? :rolleyes:


Just kidding :-D


great point!


When Im thinking about writing a feature, my palms get sweaty and I freak out, imagining how difficult and painful this behemoth will be, but if I think it as many short movies - i just imagine I got to write many many different short movies with one universal theme! Tada!

Gotta remember this when I'll grow a pair and will write 90 page beast.

RR mentioned it in "rebel" as well, i think
 
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I actually had a moment while watching "Some Kind Of Wonderful" of all movies which had the same effect... each of the scenes kind of fell off of the whole film and I actually saw the structure of the whole... it was one of those weird moments you have when you're learning to do something and it finally "Clicks".
 
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I know....jou can even go furter wit this. Al shenes in a movie have a 3 act structure. I learnd this from Roemer B. Lievaart.
He made a book calt, Alles over films maken op video (evrything about moviemaking, on video)
If joure Dutch, joure very lucky, becouse it is a realy good book.

1001004002593622.jpg
 
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Interesting point. It would be interesting to know some of your other favorites that have that form. At the moment my mind is sort of drawing a blank on what those might be.
 
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I second richy..
I can't think of anything else at the moment.

I did kind of notice that in inglourious basterds though.. But I took something different from it - namely that Tarantino isn't afraid to hang out with his characters for a while. The scene in the restaurant with the desert.. PURE character.. the plot moves absolutely nowhere.. but it's such an intense dynamic.. You take out that scene though - and the closing scene means nothing. (the aldo shwastika "I do believe this is my finest work.")

But actually now that I think of it.. maybe Christopher Waltz was just that damn good..

I will point out that True Romance and Natural Born Killers were both a lot looser in terms of a segmented structure.. (though I don't know how much of that had to do with Scott and Stone, respectively.)
 
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richy said:
Interesting point. It would be interesting to know some of your other favorites that have that form.
Click to expand...

Jurrasic Park, The Dark Knight, Ratatouille, Wall-E, The Empire Strikes Back, Liar Liar, Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix, 28 Days Later, Goonies...

Seriously, I could continue forever, to list examples that I think fit this mold. Basically -- all movies that are awesome. I can think of very few that don't follow this form. In fact, I might go so far as to say that there is a direct tie between a movie's level of success in following this form and the movie's overall awesomeness.

Tarantino movies might sometimes be misleading, with his use of chapter cards. Of his movies, "Pulp Fiction" is very unique for a blockbuster, in that it really has no overall three-act structure. There is no central conflict that needs to be resolved, no protagonist, no antagonist. Really, "Pulp Fiction" is an anthology.

But that's his only movie you can say that about. "Inglorious Basterds" has chapter cards, but they're really not needed. Remove the chapter cards, and "Basterds" is a very traditional straight-forward three-act story. "Kill Bill" is told out of sequence, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a very linear story, with a traditional three-act arc.

Think about "Empire", as an example. The AT-AT battle on Hoth has it's own miniature 3-act structure. Luke's capture by the Wampa, and Han rescuing him has it's own mini 3-act structure. Luke inadvertently finding Yoda on Dagoba -- mini 3-act. You can break down the entire movie into these smaller little sequences that have their own arc. Sometimes they're shorter, sometimes longer, but having the movie broken down into these little sections, I think, helps keep the movie forever moving forward.

Aaron, I'd have to re-watch the movie to comment on how the dessert scene, in "Basterds" fits in, plot-wise. I do recall, however, that my fingers were literally gripping my arm-rests, out of sheer terror. God, that movie is just dripping with tension!

Cheers! :)
 
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Any "road movie" comes to mind as well. Until The End of the World, Damnation Alley (for which I have fond childhood memories...it's not a good movie, but it does demonstrate this structure pretty well), The Devil's Rejects...

Not really a style of film I'm well versed in, but now that you mention it, that's EXACTLY how those movies are made!

And while Aaron mentioned True Romance and Natural Born Killers as less segmented, I actually see them just as much so, being Tarrantino's road movie (though Kill Bill isn't dissimilar, structurally). Now I want to watch True Romance again...I love that movie!
 
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richy said:
Interesting point. It would be interesting to know some of your other favorites that have that form. At the moment my mind is sort of drawing a blank on what those might be.
Click to expand...

This sort of thing has been going on forever! Here's some....

Caddyshack

Ferris Beuller's Day Off

Fast Times At Ridgemont High

EVERY John Hughes film...

Dazed and Confused

Singles

Friday

...there's oodles of them! :lol:

-- spinner :cool:
 
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Code: 
RESEARCH GRANT PROPOSAL:

Goal:  Find the smallest unit of identifiable scriptwriting

Known:  
--There are currently six fundamental units, known as quirks:  
Charming, Topsy-Turvy, Beautiful, True-Life, Strange, Feel-Good, 
Feel-Bad.
--They compose larger particles known as ShleptOnes (low budget 
films), BoringOnes (high budget flops), and MostOnes (mid-budget 
blockbusters).

Proposal:  Build a massive collater to accelerate various shorts into 
collation at high speed and  using cinematography to capture the 
scene dynamics and clips to determine the actual number of acts 
and the fundamental structure of screenwriting.  

Additional Research Goals: 
--Establish the "Oscar particle", from which flows all praise and 
recognition.  
-- Verify the universality of the "Kevin Bacon Factor" as a universal 
constant in relativity.

Budget:  Millions of dollars to be deposited on my paypal account in 
Switzerland (where I will build said accelerator for the ForMe Lab).
Joking aside, it's a good observation. Most good TV screenwriting has three stories simultaneously running: the main story (plot), sub-stories (sub-plots), and a season plot arc. Good stories (movies, plays, radio dramas, books, etc.) make use of multiple storylines to hold interest whether told linearly, in parallel, or non-linearly.
 
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JoshL said:
Any "road movie" comes to mind as well. Until The End of the World, Damnation Alley (for which I have fond childhood memories...it's not a good movie...
Click to expand...

:lol: When I saw that as a kid, for a week or more afterwards, I was terrified that when I went to bed at night there would be cockroaches under the sheets that, starting at my feet, would eat me alive. :eek:

FantasySciFi said:
Code: 
RESEARCH GRANT PROPOSAL:

Goal:  Find the smallest unit of identifiable scriptwriting

Known:  
--There are currently six fundamental units, known as quirks:  
Charming, Topsy-Turvy, Beautiful, True-Life, Strange, Feel-Good, 
Feel-Bad.
--They compose larger particles known as ShleptOnes (low budget 
films), BoringOnes (high budget flops), and MostOnes (mid-budget 
blockbusters).

Proposal:  Build a massive collater to accelerate various shorts into 
collation at high speed and  using cinematography to capture the 
scene dynamics and clips to determine the actual number of acts 
and the fundamental structure of screenwriting.  

Additional Research Goals: 
--Establish the "Oscar particle", from which flows all praise and 
recognition.  
-- Verify the universality of the "Kevin Bacon Factor" as a universal 
constant in relativity.

Budget:  Millions of dollars to be deposited on my paypal account in 
Switzerland (where I will build said accelerator for the ForMe Lab).
Joking aside, it's a good observation. Most good TV screenwriting has three stories simultaneously running: the main story (plot), sub-stories (sub-plots), and a season plot arc. Good stories (movies, plays, radio dramas, books, etc.) make use of multiple storylines to hold interest whether told linearly, in parallel, or non-linearly.
Click to expand...

:lol:
 
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knightly said:
@FantasySciFi: are you implying that that code block research proposal wouldn't work? I'd be down for writing the AI behind it.
Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zW9O3bwNgk
Yo, Knightly, what up? Coding? Yeah, I'm down with it. C++, Python, PHP, Java. My crew don't do that Lisp stuff. We're all Man-max alpha-beta search wolves with terabyte hard drives for multipass neural net backward and forward propagation for use in large TTS systems and Bayesian models with virus protection. (Except for Steve who's a Unix from an early accident with his laptop dongles. He writes the BSD Modules for the slaved servers. We don't invite him to the staff parties much cause it's awk-ward when he greps people.)

Code Block Fusion is so-o-o-o 20th century! Sticking Platinum and Gold singers into movie scripts just does not generate more energy than put in. Yeah, I know about the questionable results: Madonna, Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, etc. Evergreen with Streisand was bad chemistry. And while the published results of some production house labs suggest it's may be possible with highly specific conditions (the J'Lo catalyst), there remains room for alternate theories.

For instance, the studies at UC Berkeley show that the Hasselhoffnium was NOT the cause of explosive viewership for Baywatch but the enriched environment swimming with large bivalent molecules. Except in a German lab but that probably says something about their research protocol.

Yeah, code block research held out hope of a bountiful, endless supply of free entertainment from limited celebrities but it sadly seems to be nothing more than repackaging mid 20th century musicals with anomalous results.

[All in good fun. Cheers! :lol:]
 
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I have a little secret:
Good feature films don't have a 3 act structure. They have about 8 acts.

Something like this:

-intro (meet the actors ;))
-discovery of problem (maybe recognized and ignored or hero is unaware, unlike the viewer)
-bad decision causes real problem/villain pops up
-first solution fails
-second solution fails
-ultimate plan fails
-the protagonist feels/is/seems defeated but gets inspired by something
-the new final plan works

Try to make this fit Alien, Terminator, Notting Hill, etc.
 
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