The Nutshell Technique

Crack the Secret of Successful Screenwriting

Jill Chamberlain

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781477308660
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Drehbuchschreiben

A veteran Hollywood script consultant unlocks the secrets of storytelling in this "clever, fresh way of analyzing structure" ( Creative Screenwriting magazine ). Veteran script consultant Jill Chamberlain knows that most first-time screenwriters don't understand how to tell a story. These writers may have snappy dialogue, interesting characters, and clever plot devices—but what they deliver isn't a story. It's a situation. In order to explain the difference, Chamberlain created the Nutshell Technique, a method whereby writers identify eight dynamic, interconnected elements that are required to successfully tell a story. In this book, Chamberlain uses easy-to-follow diagrams ("nutshells") to explain how the Nutshell Technique can make or break a film script. She takes readers step-by-step through thirty classic and contemporary movies, showing how such dissimilar screenplays as Casablanca, Chinatown, Pulp Fiction, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, and Argo all have the same system working behind the scenes. She then teaches readers how to apply these principles to their own screenwriting.

Part One

THE PROBLEM with 99% of SCREENPLAYS

Chapter 1

The PROBLEM

Why Another Screenwriting Method?

AS A SCREENPLAY CONSULTANT and screenwriting instructor, I can tell you firsthand that 99% of amateur screenwriters fail to tell a story.

These writers may know how to properly format a script, how to write snappy dialogue, and how to set the scenes. They may have an interesting character here and there and perhaps some clever plot devices. But, invariably, while they may have the kernel of a good idea for a screenplay, they fail to tell a story that works. What the 99% present instead is a situation.

The solution lies in story structure. A misunderstood and often poorly conveyed subject, story structure is both the most difficult and the most important concept in screenwriting, accounting for about 75% of the screenwriter’s creative effort.

There is a central unifying system at work behind great screenplays. It consists of eight requisite elements and, most importantly, essential interdependencies between these elements.

I needed a straightforward way to convey to my clients and students what was not working structurally in their screenplays, and I wanted a road map to show them exactly how to fix things. I mapped out these eight elements and their interdependencies and put it all on a one-page form. I somewhat glibly labeled that first piece of paper “Screenplay in a Nutshell,” and this approach became known as the Nutshell Technique.

This dynamic system is the hidden structure behind the greatest screenplays. You’ll find it working behind the scenes in Casablanca, Chinatown, The Godfather, and Pulp Fiction. Consciously or not, screenwriters including Charlie Kaufman, Michael Arndt, and Diablo Cody all incorporate its principles.

There are people in Hollywood who are said to “intuitively” know story. What I’m doing is giving you a huge shortcut to story intuition.

I hear some screenwriting theorists say their approaches are “descriptive, not prescriptive.” Well, in my workshops, the Nutshell Technique is prescriptive. Writers use it up front as a worksheet to get straight to the guts of their story and make sure it works before they’ve even started a screenplay or treatment. They identify the Nutshell Technique’s eight elements in their own story, and the Nutshell Technique form gives them a visual means to check whether or not the essential interdependencies are working together correctly. If the elements are all working, the writer knows that they have the basis for a structurally solid story. If the elements are not all working together, the writer knows they have a situation instead of a story, and they can see right on the form their options for how to transform their situation into a story that works.

The Nutshell Technique doesn’t make stories more alike or formulaic. It makes them better and more powerful. It pushes writers to find less predictable directions for their stories, making them more satisfying. Writers who use the Nutshell Technique find that figuring out this little bit of structure—just eight things—frees them instead of restricting them. Setting up a sound structure from the get-go allows writers to write truthfully and without inhibition. The Nutshell Technique helps guide them to tell the story they originally intended to tell.

You’ll see the Nutshell Technique structure behind the vast majority of feature films released in the United States. Almost all will contain a version of these eight elements. The Nutshell Technique interdependencies may not be working in the films 100% of the time, but often I find that had the story been tweaked so all eight elements did work, it seems it would have been a better movie.

This is not a comprehensive how-to book on screenwriting. Subjects such as screenplay formatting, dialogue, and character development are outside of its scope. The focus here is on something more essential and so often misunderstood: how to structure a screenplay so that it tells a compelling, satisfying story.

Learn the Nutshell Technique and you’ll have an incredibly powerful tool for harnessing the full potential that a well-crafted tale can have.

The Traditional Three-Act Screenplay

Since the existence of the first feature-length films at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hollywood has structured screenplays in three acts. The first book explaining the three-act screenplay model, however, wouldn’t come until 1979 when the late Syd Field published Screenplay.

Today most screenwriting theorists continue to incorporate the three-act paradigm (a few claim a different number of acts, but it seems to me those theorists are parsing the same three acts). I also begin with the three-act model, although it alone isn’t enough to ensure that a story is structurally sound. But it functions as the most basic foundation for the screenplay. So let me review.

THE GENERALLY AGREED-UPON PRINCIPLES OF FEATURE-SCREENPLAY THREE-ACT STRUCTURE

Most feature-length films are about two hours long or a little under, usually around 110 to 120 minutes. Most screenplays are between 110 and 120 pages. This is not a coincidence. One of the reasons the film industry has stuck with the odd margins and the antiquated Courier font from back when screenplays were written on typewriters is because someone realized early on that one page of a formatted screenplay is roughly equal to one minute of screen time. I’ll be referring to pages and minutes largely interchangeably because they essentially are the same in screenwriting.

In the three-act screenplay, Act 1 is about 30 pages; Act 2 is twice as long, about 60 pages; and Act 3 is about 30 pages.

Act 1 introduces us to the protagonist and their world, and at around page 25, there is a turning point that will spin the story in a different direction. There are a lot of different terms used for this turning point but most everyone agrees every feature-film screenplay needs a strong event to push the story and the protagonist into the figurative New World that is Act 2. Field called it Plot Point 1, and so we’ll call it that for now.

It is often said that the story really begins with Act 2. The protagonist’s life has been pushed in a previously unexpected direction and now, as many a clichéd film synopsis says, “complications ensue.” In Act 2, the protagonist will face a seemingly unending series of obstacles.

Act 2 ends in another turning point that will move the story in yet another direction, usually at around pages 85 to 90. Field called this turning point Plot Point 2. It pushes the story and the protagonist into Act 3, which is known as the Resolution. At the very beginning of Act 3 is what most screenwriters would define as the Climax of the story, which is also sometimes known as the False Resolution. By the end of Act 3 the story is fully resolved.

The vast majority of books on screenwriting structure present the three-act approach. From here, the existing books typically fall into one of three camps when it comes to further discussion of screenplay structure:

• Like Field, they lay out only the bare minimum requirements of three-act structure and leave you hanging when it comes to how to develop a plot into a satisfying story. Writers who try to use these approaches usually find themselves petering out by the beginning of Act 2, as their plots lose tension and organic conflict.

• Some give advice and present theories that are all over the place with no unified central principles. They just point out a bunch of different little observations of elements that may hold true in Casablanca or Chinatown but may very well not be true for the story you are trying to tell. Writers trying to use these approaches, having been given no coherent structure, often never even get started.

• Others give you a one-size-fits-all, paint-by-numbers Hollywood movie boilerplate, dictating some 12 or 15 or 22 required moments. As you might expect, these scripts tend to tell similar tales. And while these 12 to 22 steps may hold true for Star Wars, many great films clearly do not follow them. Some writers using these approaches will realize how unsatisfying their screenplays are to write, and thus to read, and will abandon them. Other writers will actually get to the end of their screenplays, and then are puzzled as to why they can’t break into Hollywood with them. They will continue to write unsatisfying screenplay after unsatisfying screenplay, never gaining insight into why things are going wrong.

And here’s the thing: you can follow the advice of all three camps and still fail to tell a story, which is what 99% of amateur screenwriters end up doing.

None of the books explain the interdependencies between key elements that are spread out over the three acts and specific intersections that occur between the plot and the protagonist’s character arc. These interrelationships and intersections are required to properly tell a story.

Comedy and Tragedy

Syd Field didn’t do this, but other screenwriting instructors, myself included, find it useful to divide all feature-film screenplays into two categories: comedies and tragedies.

When we speak of comedies in this context, we’re not talking about the film genre of comedy. We’re using the academic definitions of comedy and tragedy as described by Aristotle in his work Poetics over 2,300 years ago. As a matter of fact, thousands of books have been written on screenwriting, and as a sum total they have added about 5% to the understanding of dramatic storytelling that was first laid out by Aristotle over 2,200 years before the invention of the moving picture.

In a tragedy, Aristotle said, the protagonist has a change of fortune that

must be not to good fortune from bad but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man.¹

Applied to the feature-film screenplay:

A tragedy is a story where the protagonist fails to overcome a flaw and falls from good fortune to bad, which means it usually has a sad ending.

A comedy is essentially the opposite.² In a feature-film screenplay:

A comedy is a story where the protagonist is able to overcome their flaw and learn its opposite, and the protagonist sees their fortune go from bad to good, which means it usually has a happy ending.

Story versus S...