to a resolution and generally implies a diminished role for characterization. In short, if you use plot, the likelihood is that it will play a dominant role in the script. There are short films, such as The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B), where a very modest plot is used; the New York blackout is more a plot device than plot proper, but it is nevertheless the plot of The Lady in Waiting. More often, however, when a plot is used it dominates the short script. Because it does so, it bears down on the main character and his or her goal with particular intensity. If that plot does not oppose the main character’s goal, the script as a whole softens under the intensity of a character’s pur- suit, with too little resistance offered to that pursuit. The result is a loss of credibility in the character. This is true for melodrama. It’s useful to look for a moment at the situation comedy, which is the “pos- itive” (in photographic terms) of the melodrama. This means that elements such as plot will be used in the opposite way to how they’re used in the melodrama. In Matthew Huffman’s film Secret Santa, it is Christmas time. The seven-year-old main character simply wants not to be bullied and belit- tled by a larger classmate. That’s his goal. The plot enables him to achieve that goal as follows: A bank robbery is carried out by six men wearing Santa Claus outfits. One escapes, but is injured in his hurry to get away. He is found by the seven-year-old, who believes he has found Santa Claus. He takes him home, where the robber hides in the basement. This is the catalytic event. In the second act, the boy befriends “Santa” and convinces him to have words with the bully. “Santa” tells the bully to be good—or no presents this year. The bully complies: the main character achieves his goal. (“Santa” is caught climbing out of the basement window.). Here the plot—robbery and its aftermath—enables the main character to achieve his goal. Tone Generally, the tone of the long-form melodrama is realistic. The short film has a much greater tolerance for moving away from realism. Because of the urgency of the character and his goal, or conversely, because of the intensity of the plot, subjectivity and irony both have a place in the melodrama. In this sense, the short film more readily offers the writer the option to enlist his or her voice directly in the script. CASE STUDIES These case studies will illustrate how short films that are melodramas use character, structure, and tone. The Melodrama 165 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 165 Case Studies in Character In Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit, a young woman returns to visit the father she has not seen since she was a child. As a child, she had been a witness to her mother’s death in a car accident; her father had been driving. The current visit does not go well. Her father, an alcoholic, is inappropriately affectionate with her. He’s sexually jealous of a friend she has made at work. In fact, the visit is a disaster, but it does prompt her to recall her early life. She remembers his tem- per and his possessiveness toward her mother. As the story ends, she is left with a conscious feeling of her guilt for her mother’s death. She felt guilty because the accident occurred when her father swerved to avoid hitting a rabbit. He had always called her Rabbit. In My Name Is Rabbit, the character pursues her goal of a relationship with a father who is a mystery to her. Although she discovers that a relationship is impossible, her pursuit is understandable and earnest. Because she is modest, her father’s over-the-top drinking and salaciousness is all the more shocking. By the end of the film, we understand that it is the father, rather than Rabbit, who bears the responsibility for the family tragedy. Case Studies in Structure Christian Taylor’s The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B) proceeds in an Act I–Act II structure, essentially resulting in an open-ended conclusion. In this film, the main character is asked to take a letter to New York. This event—taking the letter to New York—is not the same as the catalytic event, or turning point between acts. The turning point here is when the elevator stops as a result of the power outage. Act II is dominated by the exploration of the relationship between Miss Peach and Scarlett. From the elevator, to the apartment, to the parting of their ways, the focus is on how Scarlett influ- ences Miss Peach. The story is character-driven; it has little plot (the power outage). The end is open, leaving us hopeful that Miss Peach will feel better about herself. She remains, however, marginalized. Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story exemplifies the Act I–Act III structure. The main character is a six-year-old girl. The film opens with children being very playful on a school bus. The driver tells them to settle down, not to show each other their underwear. The driver seems to be a genuine friend to the main character. In the following scene, a school psychologist looks into a parallel incident, where the driver was inappropriately friendly with the children. The act ends with the driver being arrested for molesting the main character. In the next act, the investigation continues. We learn that the main character has had “numerous fathers.” The community is pressing for con- viction of the driver. This requires the testimony of the main character. As the 166 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 166 psychologist tries to learn more via play therapy, the main character is fear- ful about releasing a secret. Ultimately, though, she inadvertently reveals that it is the mother’s current lover who has been molesting her. The script ends with the driver freed, once again presented as a true and caring friend to the main character. In A Children’s Story, the discovery of the true antagonist and his conse- quent arrest brings the story to resolution. In this sense, the long act resem- bles Act III of a feature film. A Case Study in Plot Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story also provides us with an example of the deployment of plot in the short film. In the classic sense of melodrama, plot works in opposition to the main character’s goal. In this film, the goal of the main character is to keep the family secret of sexual abuse. She does so out of fear of losing her mother’s love. The plot—the investigation into the case of sexual abuse—puts continual pressure (via the school psychologist) on the main character. As the investigation progresses, so does the pressure to reveal the secret. As expected in a melodrama with plot, there will be resolution and, accordingly, an Act I–Act III structure. There also will be twists and turns— thus the catalytic event, the arrest of the driver; and the resolution, the arrest of the mother’s lover. What also needs to be mentioned is that the presence of plot diminishes the level of characterization in the screenplay as well as the screenplay’s dependence on the dialogue for energy. In plot-driven melo- dramas, the characterizations are often stereotypes, and the energy in the screenplay derives instead from the twists and turns of plot. Case Studies in Tone The tone of the short melodrama is usually realistic. Christian Taylor’s The Lady in Waiting and Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story are each presented realistically. This means recognizable characters in recognizable situations. The result is a dramatic arc for the main character that does not veer from the expected. Having confirmed the expected tone of the genre, it’s important to reaf- firm that tone in the short film has a wider latitude than does tone in the long-form melodrama. Two examples will illustrate the point. Ayanna Elliot’s Tough is a story of a teenager. The story is simple, “a day in the life.” But it’s a special day—the first day she menstruates. She is on the verge of womanhood. Also, her father (divorced from her mother) is to take her out The Melodrama 167 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 167 for the day. The incidents in the story are as follows: She has a vicious argu- ment with her mother. Her mother is more attentive to her female lover than she is to her daughter’s anxiety about menstruation. The main character decides to move out. Her father does not realize it, but the main character is now planning to be with him for more than the day. The main character insists on bringing a friend along. The father insists on bringing his new lover along. Needless to say, parenting is not the order of the day—rather, who can be more childish, the adults or the children, is the goal. In order to make her point about “who is the parent here,” Ayanna Elliot uses humor and irony. If there is a consistent tone to Tough, it is irony. The tone is effective in making her point about parenting. Emily Weissman’s Pocketful of Stones offers a very different tone. This film opens with the admission of the main character, in her late teens, into a hos- pital. She has attempted suicide; a failed relationship has driven her to the act. The story focuses on her hospital stay. Will she get better or worse? The story ends with her more withdrawn than ever and confined to the hospital. In between, we learn that her goal is to get out of the hospital. Although rebellious toward authority (the nurse), she is nevertheless fairly reality based. She develops a relationship with a young man, also a patient. Through his influence and control, she is coaxed into self-mutilating behav- ior, and she becomes increasingly withdrawn, then aggressive. She goes from talking with the psychiatrist about a release plan, to behavior troubling enough to preclude release. At the end of the story, she is worse off than she had been at the beginning. The tone in Pocketful of Stones is expressionistic, even nightmarish, empha- sizing the main character’s emotional, subjective state. By doing so, Emily Weissman puts us in her place—time is obliterated, authority figures are monsters, the hospital is a war zone. By resorting to an exceedingly subjec- tive tone, Emily Weissman avoids the case-study approach and takes us inside mental illness. The result is very powerful. Here again, moving away from the expected tone creates a powerful and fresh experience. Here tone makes the short film quite an original experience. Summation The key issue in writing melodrama in the short film is that there are classic commonalties between the long and short forms—the nature of the main character’s struggle, his or her powerless against the power structure, the recognizability of character and situation, the characters living the lives that we do, and of course the narrative approach, which is essentially realist. But the differences between long and short films are considerable. Compression of time means faster characterization and fewer characters and 168 Writing the Short Film Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 168 plot. It also means a structural choice—for an Act I–II approach or an Act I–III approach. The short film also allows the writer latitude in the area of tone. Like the short story, metaphor and poetics can work in the short melo- drama in a way that the need for greater characterization and plot tends to disallow in the long film. The key in all your considerations about the short film is to be aware of these similarities and differences. The Melodrama 169 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 169 Ch13.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 170 14 THE DOCUDRAMA On one level, that of content, docudrama has much in common with melo- drama. The nature of the struggle, the positioning of the main character, and the tone are similar. But on the issue of style, the manner of presentation of the story, they differ. The docudrama is concerned with a particular kind of style, a style that assures an aura of veracity. This style may be present in the melodrama, but it is never as central a feature as it is in the docudrama. The docudrama has its roots in the documentary. The sense of actuality in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Man of Aran conveyed the idea of cultures quickly giving way to modern urban life. Equally important, how- ever, these documentaries took editorial positions about those cultures, advo- cacy positions that were romantic but also represented a wish that the pattern of these cultures passing were not so inevitable a byproduct of moderniza- tion. These two elements—actuality and a social, or political, perspective on the life situation of the participants—link the documentary directly to the docudrama. Whether anarchistic (Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera) or fascist (Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), the documentary quickly became a form whose agenda was principally educational and propagandistic rather than entertaining. This quality too became a link to the docudrama. Style became more pronounced in the ‘50s with “direct cinema,” in the documentaries of Lindsay Anderson (Everyday Except Christmas) and Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson (Momma Don’t Allow). This was even more the case in the “cinema verité” explosion in the documentary film- makers of the ‘60s (Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers). But no examples of the style sacrificed those original intentions—actuality, edu- cation, political goals. Also, the style crossed over into the feature film— Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool and Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate. In the 171 Ch14.qxd 9/27/04 6:10 PM Page 171 . modest, her father’s over -the- top drinking and salaciousness is all the more shocking. By the end of the film, we understand that it is the father, rather than. Summation The key issue in writing melodrama in the short film is that there are classic commonalties between the long and short forms the nature of the main